Product Sunset/Deprecation Plan Template

For consumer features, 30-60 days is typical. For developer APIs and B2B products, 6-12 months is the standard. Enterprise contracts may specify minimum notice periods. Check your terms of service and any custom agreements. When in doubt, give more notice. The cost of extending the timeline is almost always less than the cost of angry customers.

Start with a 1:1 conversation to understand their blockers. Common reasons include: no engineering bandwidth, missing feature parity in the replacement, or contractual commitments. For high-value accounts, consider offering dedicated migration engineering support, extended timelines, or temporary compatibility layers. Document these exceptions in the plan.

If customers paid for a specific product that is being sunset before the contract term ends, yes. Proactive credits demonstrate good faith and reduce churn risk. Work with finance to model the refund cost against the retention benefit. A $5K credit that saves a $50K/year account is a good investment.

Be honest. Tell customers why you are removing the feature and what alternatives exist (including competitor products if applicable). Provide a data export so they can take their information elsewhere. Honesty about a missing replacement builds more trust than pretending an inferior workaround is equivalent.

The sunset should appear on the [roadmap](/guides/how-to-build-a-product-roadmap) as a dedicated initiative with its own milestones. Engineering time for migration tooling, compatibility layers, and decommissioning should be scoped and scheduled like any other project. Sunsets that are treated as side work consistently run over timeline. ---