Setup

The Hosted Cancel Flow gives your customers a fully-managed cancellation page that lives on a Churnkey URL — no embed required. You point your "Cancel Subscription" link at it, and Churnkey handles authentication, the cancel experience, and the redirect back to your app. This page walks you through enabling it and dialing in the foundational settings.

Prerequisites

Before you turn on the hosted experience, make sure you have:

• A Churnkey account with a connected billing provider.
• A published Cancel Flow. If you haven't created one yet, follow the Cancel Flow quick start guide first — the underlying flow logic is shared between the embedded and hosted versions, so anything you've already built carries over.

Step One: Confirm Hosted Cancel Flow is enabled

Navigate to Cancel Flow → Hosted in the Churnkey dashboard. The Hosted Cancel Flow toggle is on by default for new accounts, so most teams find the page already live at the fallback domain the first time they open this tab. Confirm the toggle reads "Enabled" before moving on.

When the toggle is on, your hosted URL is live at the fallback domain:

https://billing.churnkey.co/cancel/<your-app-id>

You can start linking to that URL from your app immediately. If you'd rather host the flow on your own subdomain or a fully custom domain, see Domains — both options layer on top of the same underlying flow.

If the toggle is off (because someone on your team disabled it), flipping it back on takes effect the next time a customer loads the URL — they will see an "unavailable" message until then.

Step Two: Set the Return URL

The Return URL is where Churnkey sends the customer once they finish (or skip) the cancel flow. Two patterns work well here:

1. Send them back to their account or billing page (for example https://yourapp.com/account) so they land somewhere familiar.
2. Send them to a "we're sorry to see you go" page that confirms the cancellation in your own voice.

Always serve the Return URL over https:// — the entire cancel-flow journey runs over HTTPS, and sending customers back to a plain-http:// page produces mixed-content warnings in the browser. After a cancellation completes, Churnkey shows a confirmation screen with a 10-second countdown before redirecting automatically. Customers who want to leave faster can click through immediately.

Step Three: Configure expirations

Two separate timers control how long links and codes stay valid. Both exist for security reasons, and both are worth thinking about.

Verification code expiration controls how long the code Churnkey emails a customer remains valid when they go through self-serve email verification. The default is 10 minutes, and you can set it anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes. Shorter windows are more secure — a code that's only good for a few minutes is harder to intercept and reuse. Longer windows are more forgiving when customers get distracted mid-flow, switch tabs, or check email on a different device.

Session link expiration controls how long a Cancel Link stays valid. A Cancel Link is the signed URL your backend generates through the Churnkey API and hands to a logged-in customer — it bypasses the email verification step because your own server has already authenticated the user. The default is 24 hours, and you can set it anywhere between 1 hour and 7 days.

The security tradeoff with session links is straightforward: the longer a link stays valid, the larger the window in which a leaked link could be abused by someone who shouldn't have access to that subscription. If your customers click cancel links within minutes of you generating them, a short expiration is safer. If you embed the link in an email or a help article and expect customers to click later, give yourself more breathing room.

Step Four: Test the flow

Once the basics are configured, open your hosted URL in a browser and walk through the experience exactly as a customer would. Confirm that the offers, questions, and final cancellation step behave the way you expect, and that the Return URL lands the customer where you intended. The Appearance tab (see Appearance) also shows a live preview alongside its color and font controls — handy if you want to see your branding changes without leaving the dashboard.

In test mode, the flow runs against your test billing provider data, so you can cancel a test subscription end-to-end without touching real customer records. When you're satisfied, switch to live mode and the same flow starts serving real customers.

What's next

With the hosted flow enabled, the next steps are mostly about making it feel like part of your product:

• Domains — point a custom domain or a Churnkey subdomain at your hosted flow.
• Appearance — customize colors, logos, and copy so the page matches your brand.
• Cancel Links — generate signed URLs from your backend for logged-in customers.
• Email verification — let customers self-serve by verifying ownership over email.