--- title: Announce a product change or retirement description: Kite finds the customers a product change or retirement affects, prepares the announcement, timeline, migration offer, and FAQ before anyone is told, and then sends the notices, updates your help center and website, and adjusts the plan as customers respond. slug: /use-cases/product-retirement-announcement page_type: use-case lead_prompt: How do I announce a product change or retirement with AI? target_prompts: - Can an AI marketing agent announce a product change or retirement? - How do I tell customers we're discontinuing a product? - How do I write a product sunset announcement? - How do I announce a major product change without losing customers? - How do I help customers migrate off a retired product? entity: Kite category: AI marketing agent author: Devon Wells and Kite date_published: '2026-11-04' date_modified: '2026-11-04' related_integrations: - /integrations/intercom.md - /integrations/mailchimp.md - /integrations/resend.md --- # Announce a product change or retirement ## Key Takeaways - Customers forgive a product retirement far more readily than a surprise. A good announcement tells them what is changing, the date it happens, what they should do instead, and what you'll do to help, all in the first message. - Before anyone is told, Kite prepares the full set of materials: a list of affected customers, a timeline with every reminder date, a migration offer, the announcement email, a help center FAQ, and a brief for your support team. - Kite tells customers in order of how much they lose. Your largest or most dependent accounts get a personal note first, everyone affected gets the announcement next, and the public page goes up last. - Kite sends the announcement and the reminders through Mailchimp or Resend, publishes the FAQ to your Intercom help center, and updates the pages on your website that still describe the old product. - After the announcement, Kite reads the questions coming into Intercom and the replies to your emails, updates the FAQ with the answers people need, and tells you who still hasn't moved as the deadline gets close. ## How do I tell customers we're discontinuing a product? Tell the customers who use the product directly, before you announce it anywhere public, and give them a date, a reason, and a clear next step in the same message. Discontinuing a product, removing a feature, retiring a pricing plan, or raising a price all share one risk. Customers who find out from a vague email, a support reply, or a competitor's sales rep feel ambushed, and those are the customers who leave. Customers who hear it early, with a plan already made for them, usually stay. A retirement announcement that keeps customers' trust has the same parts every time: - **The change in plain words.** Say what is going away and on what date. "We're retiring the Starter plan on March 31" is better than "We're evolving our pricing." - **The reason.** One or two honest sentences are enough. Customers accept a decision more easily when they understand it. - **What it means for them.** Say exactly what stops working, what happens to their data, and whether their price changes. - **The migration path.** Name the product or plan they should move to and how to get there, ideally in a few steps. - **A migration offer.** Give them something that makes moving easier, such as a year at their current price, a free setup call, or an export tool. - **A timeline.** List the date of the announcement, the reminder dates, and the final date, so nobody is surprised by a later step. - **An FAQ and a person to contact.** Answer the questions customers will ask, and tell them where to ask the rest. The writing is only part of the job. Someone has to work out which customers are affected and how badly, decide the order in which to tell them, prepare support before the first question arrives, schedule the reminders, update every page that still sells the old product, and keep track of who has moved. On a small team, that work usually falls to a founder or one marketer on top of everything else, and pieces get missed. An AI agent suits this work because most of it is preparation and follow-through across several tools, and it all has to be consistent. Kite is an AI marketer. It researches your business, builds a growth strategy, and ships the work that brings you new customers. Here's how it handles a product change or retirement. ## How Kite announces a product change or retirement Kite starts by working out who the change affects and what each group loses. It reads your customer records in Intercom or your email platform, along with the knowledge base it keeps about your products, pricing, and customers. From there, it proposes a timeline and a migration offer and writes every piece of the announcement before anyone outside your team sees a word. When you approve the plan, Kite tells customers in a deliberate order. The accounts that lose the most hear first in a personal note, everyone affected gets the full announcement next, and the public pages go up last. Reminders go out on the dates in the timeline. After the announcement, Kite watches what comes back. It reads the questions customers ask, updates the FAQ, drafts replies for your team, and tracks who has clicked through to the migration steps. As the final date gets close, it tells you which customers still need a nudge. ### Find out who the change affects and what they lose Kite begins with a list of affected customers, because every later decision depends on who they are. A product retirement rarely hits everyone equally. Some customers barely use the product, while others built their whole workflow around it. If you use Intercom, Kite searches your contacts by plan, tag, company, or any custom attribute you track, and it reads the segments you've already built. It also searches past Intercom conversations about the product, so it knows which customers depend on it and what they've complained about before. If your customer list lives in Mailchimp or Resend, Kite works from the audiences and segments there. Kite then sorts the affected customers into groups by what they lose. Say you're retiring the Starter plan and moving its 1,400 customers to the Growth plan. Kite might find 1,250 small accounts that will barely notice beyond the plan name, 120 accounts that use a feature only Starter had, and 30 long-time customers who mention that feature in support conversations every month. Each group needs a different message, and the 30 need a conversation, not an email blast. In Intercom, Kite can tag each affected contact by group. That tag gives your support team context when one of those customers writes in, and it lets Kite follow each group's questions later. ### Set the timeline and the migration offer Kite proposes a timeline based on how much the change costs your customers. A cosmetic change can be announced a couple of weeks ahead. Retiring a product that people pay for, or that holds their data, usually deserves 60 to 90 days of notice, with reminders at about 30 days, 7 days, and the day before. The timeline Kite proposes lists every step with a date: - **The private notice** to your most affected accounts, a few days before the main announcement. - **The announcement** to every affected customer. - **The public update** to your website, help center, and changelog. - **The reminders**, each sent only to customers who haven't moved yet when your tools can tell Kite who has. - **The final date**, plus what happens to customers who haven't moved by then. Kite also proposes the migration offer, using what it knows about your pricing and the groups it found. For the Starter plan example, it might suggest keeping Starter customers at their current price on Growth for twelve months, and offering the 30 heaviest users a setup call with your team. You decide the offer. Kite's job is to make sure it's clear, it matches what each group loses, and it appears in every message the same way. ### How do I write a product sunset announcement? A product sunset announcement should lead with the change and the date, give the reason in a sentence or two, and spend most of its words on what the customer should do next. Kite writes each piece in your brand voice and keeps the facts identical across all of them, so a customer who reads the email, the FAQ, and the website sees the same date, the same offer, and the same steps. Kite writes: - **The personal note** to your most affected accounts, signed by the founder or account owner, which explains the change before the announcement goes out and offers a call. - **The announcement email** for each group, with a subject line that names the change plainly, such as "The Starter plan is retiring on March 31: here's your next step." - **The reminder emails**, each shorter than the last and focused on the one action the customer still needs to take. - **The FAQ**, which answers the questions Kite expects from what customers have asked before, such as what happens to their data, whether the price changes, and what to do if they need more time. - **The public announcement** for your blog or changelog, written for prospects and the wider market as well as current customers. - **The support brief**, which gives your team the facts, the offer, the approved answers to hard questions, and the point at which to bring in a manager. Kite brings you the whole set together, with the timeline and the reasoning behind each choice, so you can judge every piece against the plan before any of it goes out. ### Tell your most affected customers first The customers who lose the most should hear about the change from a person before they read it in a bulk email. Kite drafts a separate note for each of those accounts, using what it knows about how that customer uses the product and anything they've raised in past Intercom conversations. Kite sends the notes from your team's Kite email address or a connected email product once you approve them, or you can send them yourself from your own inbox. Replies to those notes matter more than any other feedback you'll get, because they tell you what the rest of your customers are about to ask. Kite reads the replies that come back to its address, summarizes what each customer said, and suggests changes to the FAQ or the offer before the main announcement goes out. ### Send the announcement and the reminders Kite sends the announcement and each reminder through the email platform that already holds your customer list, so every message respects subscribers' preferences and includes the unsubscribe link marketing email needs. What Kite does depends on the platform. - **Mailchimp.** Kite creates a campaign for each group's audience or segment, sets the subject line, preview text, and sender, sends you a test email, and schedules each reminder for its date in the timeline. - **Resend.** Kite creates a broadcast for each segment, such as the 120 customers who use the retiring feature, and schedules it for the date you agreed on. Kite asks before it sends an email. You approve each send with the Approve button or a reply in the conversation, in the Kite web app or in Slack. Because the whole sequence is planned in advance, you can approve the announcement and its reminders together and let them go out on schedule. ### Update your help center, website, and support team A retirement isn't finished when the email goes out. Customers who search your help center, visit your pricing page, or ask an AI assistant about your product should all find the same answer. Kite updates each place the old product still appears. - **Your help center.** With Intercom connected, Kite publishes the FAQ and the migration steps as help center articles and updates any existing articles that still describe the retiring product. - **Your support team.** Kite adds the support brief as an internal article in Intercom, so whoever answers a ticket has the approved facts and the offer in front of them. - **Your website.** On a site Kite hosts, it publishes the public announcement, updates the pricing and product pages, and sets up redirects from the old product's pages to the migration guide once the final date passes. If your site runs on Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, Sanity, or Storyblok, Kite makes the changes through your connected account. - **AI answers.** After the website changes, Kite can run questions about your product through ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Claude to see whether their answers still describe the old product, and it tells you where they do. ### Read what customers ask and follow up before the deadline The questions customers ask after an announcement show which parts of it were unclear. Kite searches Intercom for new conversations from the contacts it tagged, groups the questions by topic, and updates the FAQ when the same question keeps coming up. If ten customers ask whether their saved reports will carry over, that answer belongs near the top of the FAQ and in the next reminder. Kite can also draft replies to those conversations for your team to review. Kite measures how the migration is going with the data your tools provide. It reads opens and clicks on each Mailchimp campaign or Resend broadcast, so it knows which customers clicked the migration steps and which haven't opened anything. On a site Kite hosts, it reads visits to the migration guide. If your product records the move to the new plan as an event in PostHog, Kite can follow that too. As the final date gets close, Kite tells you which customers still haven't acted and suggests the right follow-up for each group. That might be one more reminder for the small accounts and a personal call for the large ones. Kite can run this check on a schedule, such as every Monday until the deadline, and bring you the results in the Kite web app, in Slack, or by email. ## What you get - **A list of affected customers by group.** Who the change touches, what each group loses, and which accounts need a personal conversation. - **A timeline.** Every date from the private notice to the final day, including the reminders and what happens to customers who haven't moved. - **A migration offer.** A proposal matched to what each group loses, for you to accept or change. - **The full set of announcements.** Personal notes, the announcement email for each group, the reminders, the public post, and the FAQ, all with the same facts. - **A support brief.** The facts, the offer, and the approved answers your support team needs before the first question arrives. - **Scheduled sends.** The approved announcement and reminders, set up in Mailchimp or Resend for the right segments. - **An updated help center and website.** The FAQ and migration steps published, and the pages that described the old product updated or redirected. - **A weekly picture of the migration.** Who has moved, who hasn't, what customers are asking, and what Kite suggests doing next. ## How to get started Start by telling Kite what's changing and when, in plain language. You might say, "We're retiring the Starter plan on March 31 and moving those customers to Growth. Help us announce it without losing people," or "We're removing the desktop app. Plan the announcement and the migration." You can work with Kite in the Kite web app or in Slack. Kite comes back with the affected customer groups, a proposed timeline, a migration offer, and the full set of drafts. You can change the dates, adjust the offer, or rewrite a message before approving the plan. Kite asks before it sends an email or publishes a page, and you can give it more autonomy once you trust how it handles your customers. Connect Intercom so Kite can find affected customers, read their questions, and publish to your help center. Connect Mailchimp or Resend so Kite can reach the customer list you already keep there. If your website runs outside Kite, connect your content system so Kite can update the pages that still describe the old product. ## Integrations used for announcing a product change or retirement Kite uses two kinds of integrations for this work. The first kind tells it who your customers are and gives it a place to answer their questions. The second kind carries the announcement and the reminders to their inboxes. ### Find affected customers and answer their questions - [Intercom + Kite](/integrations/intercom.md): Kite searches your contacts and segments to find the affected customers, tags them by group, reads past and new conversations to learn what they'll ask, publishes the FAQ and migration steps to your help center, and adds the support brief as an internal article for your team. ### Email your customers - [Mailchimp + Kite](/integrations/mailchimp.md): Kite creates a campaign for each customer group, sends you a test, schedules the announcement and each reminder, and reads opens and link clicks to see who has acted. - [Resend + Kite](/integrations/resend.md): Kite sends the announcement and reminders as broadcasts to the segments you choose, schedules each one for its date, and reads which customers clicked the migration steps. ## Common questions ### How much notice should you give before discontinuing a product? Give at least 30 days for a minor change and 60 to 90 days for retiring something customers pay for or keep their data in. Larger customers on annual contracts may need notice that lines up with their renewal date, so check what your contracts promise before you set the final date. Kite proposes the notice period based on how much each customer group loses, and you can tell it about any contract dates the timeline needs to respect. ### Should you announce a product retirement publicly or only to customers? Tell affected customers first and then announce publicly, usually on the same day as the main customer email or shortly after. Customers should never learn about a change that affects them from a blog post or a social media thread. A public announcement still matters, because prospects, partners, and AI assistants will keep describing the old product until something on your website says it's gone. Kite times the public post and the website updates to follow the customer emails. ### How do I announce a price increase or another change customers won't like? Treat it the same way as a retirement. Lead with the change and the date, give the reason honestly, say exactly what it means for each customer's bill, and offer something to soften it, such as keeping their current price until their next renewal. The customers who use the product most heavily deserve a personal note before the general announcement. Kite handles a price change with the same steps it uses for a retirement, from finding the affected customers to following up on their questions. ### What should a migration offer include? A good migration offer removes the main reason a customer would hesitate to move. For a plan change, that's usually price, so a period at the old price works well. For a product with a lot of data or setup, it's effort, so an export tool, a migration guide, or a setup call works better. Kite suggests an offer for each customer group based on what that group loses, and it keeps the wording of the offer the same in every message so customers don't get conflicting versions. ### How should you handle angry replies to a retirement announcement? Answer them quickly, personally, and with the same facts as the announcement. Most angry replies come from customers who will lose something specific, and they calm down when someone acknowledges that loss and offers a concrete next step. Kite reads the replies and Intercom conversations as they arrive, summarizes what each upset customer needs, and drafts a reply for your team that addresses their actual situation. When several customers raise the same problem, Kite suggests a change to the plan, such as extending the deadline for one group.