Inspiration
Subscription cancellations are a major challenge for SaaS businesses. Most platforms simply process cancellations without understanding why customers leave. We wanted to build something smarter — a platform that helps businesses understand customer needs and turn potential cancellations into retention opportunities.
What it does
RETAIN.AI is an AI-powered customer retention and revenue-recovery platform.
- Understands customer cancellation reasons.
- Uses AI to generate personalized retention strategies.
- Recommends relevant offers within merchant-defined business rules and limits.
- Provides a customer cancellation portal and merchant dashboard.
- Helps merchants monitor retention sessions, customers, subscriptions, and performance.
- Integrates with PayPal Sandbox for subscription management.
How we built it
We built RETAIN.AI using React, TypeScript, and Vite, with TanStack Start for the application architecture. Firebase Authentication and Firestore handle authentication and data management.
Firecrawl extracts relevant business information from merchant websites. Groq with GPT-OSS-120B powers AI-based reasoning and retention recommendations. Inngest manages background workflows, while PayPal Sandbox supports subscription operations.
We also integrated Slack notifications, Resend email, and PostHog analytics.
Challenges we faced
One of our biggest challenges was designing secure merchant data access while maintaining tenant isolation. We also worked on making AI-generated recommendations relevant to customer cancellation reasons while respecting merchant-configured limits.
What we learned
We learned how to combine AI reasoning, SaaS architecture, secure database operations, third-party integrations, and subscription workflows into one practical product.
What's next
We aim to improve retention analytics, expand automated retention workflows, and help SaaS businesses make smarter, data-driven customer-retention decisions.
