Lokuna at a glance
| What it is | Autonomous AI retention agents: software that prevents subscription churn by acting on its own, not a dashboard you have to check. |
|---|---|
| Who it is for | SaaS founders and small teams that bill subscriptions through Stripe, usually without a dedicated customer success team. |
| What it needs | A Stripe account, connected in one click. Your own email provider for sending, and optionally an SMS provider. |
| What it handles | Failed payments, expiring cards, scheduled cancellations, downgrades, the cancel page, and win-back after a cancellation. |
| Pricing | Growth: free, plus 20% of the next invoice a saved customer pays. Performance: $99 per month or $950 per year. Full rules on the pricing page. |
| Company | Lokuna Inc., Montréal, Québec, Canada |
The problem it solves
Early-stage SaaS companies lose customers quietly. A card expires and nobody updates it. Someone schedules a cancellation and it takes effect at the end of the month without anyone asking why. A customer clicks cancel and gets a generic confirmation screen. Larger companies put a customer success team on this. Most founders don't have one, so the work doesn't get done.
Lokuna does that work for you. It is built around one idea: every customer conversation should start from something we actually know about that customer, and every action should be one you would have taken yourself if you had the time.
Step 1: It watches your Stripe account
When you connect Stripe, Lokuna imports your customers and subscriptions and listens to Stripe events from then on. The signals it acts on are ones Stripe can confirm:
- Failed payments: an invoice payment fails and the subscription goes past due.
- Expiring cards: the card on file expires within the next 14 days.
- Scheduled cancellations: the customer set their plan to end at the end of the billing period.
- Downgrades: the customer moved to a smaller plan.
- Cancellations: the subscription actually ended.
It also tracks how each customer responds to Lokuna's own messages: replies, one-tap answers and clicks. Today Lokuna does not see activity inside your product, so it never tells a customer it noticed they stopped logging in. It only says what Stripe and their own replies show.
Step 2: It decides who needs attention, with rules
Every customer gets a health score from 0 to 100, calculated by fixed, explainable rules that start from billing state. When a Stripe signal appears, the agents open one conversation for that customer, never several at once. No language model is involved in deciding who is at risk; the same data always gives the same answer, and you can see why each customer was flagged.
You stay in control of how far it goes. Sensitive actions can wait for your approval in a queue, where you approve, decline or delay them with one click. A randomized holdout group, 10% by default, is never contacted, so the difference between customers Lokuna talked to and customers it didn't shows whether it is actually working.
Step 3: It acts
Each signal starts a short, specific sequence. These are the defaults:
| Signal | What Lokuna sends |
|---|---|
| Failed payment | An email right away, a follow-up on day 3, a text on day 5 and a final email on day 7, each with the customer's real Stripe payment link. See failed payment recovery. |
| Card expiring soon | One heads-up email with a link to update the card before it fails. |
| Scheduled cancellation | An email asking what led to it, with a one-tap “keep my subscription” button, a reminder 5 days later and a short text 2 days after that. |
| Downgrade | One honest question a day later: is something about the product or the price not working? No upsell. |
| Customer clicks cancel | The Lokuna-hosted cancel page, with one offer chosen for that customer. See the cancel flow. |
| Subscription ended | One genuine feedback request 3 days later. No months-long drip campaign. |
Every message is written for that one customer, in your brand and from your own email domain. When someone replies or taps an answer, the automated follow-ups pause so it becomes a real conversation. The agents read the reply, sort it into a fixed list of reasons, such as price, a missing feature or a technical problem, and write the answer for you to send in one click; fixed rules decide what happens next.
The rules every message follows
The rules that keep retention from turning into spam are built in and apply across every play and both channels:
- At least 72 hours between any two messages to the same customer (48 hours for payment notices).
- At most 3 proactive messages per customer in any 30 days. You can lower this, and add a weekly limit.
- At most 1 text message per customer in any 14 days.
- Proactive emails go out on weekdays during working hours in the customer's timezone (or yours, until theirs is known).
- Proactive texts need recorded consent and a known timezone; payment texts need a known timezone.
- Ask first, offer later. Offers are a response to what the customer tells you. An email carries one only when a fixed rule says it is needed, inside your ranges, and never on top of a discount the customer already has.
- A reply or a one-tap answer pauses the automated follow-ups for that customer, and the agents write the answer for you to send.
Where AI is used, and where it isn't
AI writes each message in your voice from the facts Lokuna holds about that customer, and a separate check blocks any message that claims something we don't know or offers an incentive nobody approved. AI also sorts free-text replies into reasons and recommends the offer on the cancel page. Health scores, risk detection, contact limits, discount amounts, approvals and billing are always fixed rules. If the AI is unavailable, Lokuna falls back to built-in templates and rules, so payments and cancellations are never blocked. Details are in the AI disclosure.
Setup
- Create a workspace at app.lokuna.com and connect Stripe.
- Connect your email provider (Resend, SendGrid, Amazon SES or Postmark, or sign in with Gmail or Microsoft 365) and, if you want texts, Twilio, Vonage, MessageBird or Plivo.
- Point your “Cancel subscription” button at your Lokuna cancel page with a plain link or the one-line pop-up script.
- Choose which offers the cancel page may make and how far it may go. Then the agents run on their own.
Lokuna also configures the cancellation settings of your Stripe customer portal on connect, so a customer who cancels there is asked for a reason and their plan ends at the end of the period instead of immediately.
How pricing works
On the Growth plan, Lokuna only earns money when it saves a customer it can prove was leaving. There are four kinds of save: a failed payment recovered after Lokuna's message, a customer kept on the cancel page, a scheduled cancellation reversed, and a canceled customer who comes back within 30 days. Each needs real risk confirmed by Stripe, a message Lokuna actually delivered, and the customer acting through Lokuna. The fee is 20% of the next invoice that customer actually pays, charged once. A short dip in a health score is never billed. The Performance plan is a flat $99 per month instead. The pricing page has worked examples.
Current limitations
- Works with subscriptions billed through Stripe only.
- Product-usage, support-tool and NPS connectors are not offered yet. Today the agents work from Stripe billing data and replies to its own messages, and it never claims product usage it cannot see.
- Email goes through your own Resend, SendGrid, Amazon SES or Postmark account, or straight from your Gmail or Microsoft 365 mailbox.
- Proactive text messages need recorded consent and a known customer timezone.
