What's new?
Cancellation Flows, part of Paddle Retain, now work on sandbox accounts. You can set up a flow and test it end to end before you go live.
How it works
Cancellation Flows guide customers through a short survey when they try to cancel their subscription, then make them a dynamic offer to stay, like pausing their subscription or switching plans.
Previously, Cancellation Flows only worked on live accounts, so you couldn't set up or test them until you went live. Now, on sandbox accounts, you can:
- Create and edit flows in Paddle > Retain > Cancellation Flows.
- Preview a flow to check each page and how it behaves.
- Cancel a subscription in the customer portal to go through a flow as a customer would. Paddle applies the customer's choice to the subscription, like pausing it or applying a discount, the same way it does on live accounts.
If you set up Cancellation Flows in your live account before September 17, 2026, the configuration screens in your sandbox account look different from the ones in your live account. Your existing flow and what customers see remain unchanged. You can start testing in your sandbox account without affecting your live flow.
You no longer need to set up Paddle Retain to create, preview, and test Cancellation Flows. Payment Recovery and Term Optimization still need Retain setup and only work on live accounts.
Flows you launch with Paddle.Retain.initCancellationFlow() still only work on live accounts. To test a flow in sandbox, use the customer portal.
Next steps
This change is available now for all sandbox accounts. It's a change to the Paddle dashboard and customer portal, with no changes to the Paddle API or Paddle.js.
It's a non-breaking change, meaning it doesn't impact existing integrations.
To get started, set up a Cancellation Flow in your sandbox account. You also need an active client-side token to preview cancellation flows and to show them in the customer portal.
If you already have a flow in your live account, set it up again in your sandbox account. Flows aren’t copied between sandbox and live.