This is one of my favorite charts at Buffer right now.

It's the chart of our number of paying customers. And it might look like we've just experienced some awful churn, but that's not what it is.

Those drops in number of paying customers are when we proactively cancelled subscriptions for some of our inactive customers.

We sent them an email and let them know that unless they responded asking to keep their subscription or started using the product again, we would cancel their subscription at the next renewal.

We made a decision recently as a company that it doesn't feel right to keep charging customers who are not actively using the product.

While keeping these customers might pad our revenue a bit, I believe it will make us a more responsive business to proactively cancel those inactive subscriptions and rely on revenue from customers who are actually getting value from the product.