Free tool
See exactly how much revenue your SaaS is losing to failed subscription payments every year, and how much a dunning tool could recover. Plug in three numbers and share the result.
· Free, no signup
Quick answer
A typical SaaS loses 5-15% of MRR per year to failed payments. Stripe Smart Retries alone recovers ~38% of that. A dedicated dunning tool with email + SMS + WhatsApp + checkout recovery typically lifts recovery to 60-80%. Run the numbers below for your own MRR.
Your current annual loss
lost to failed payments every year, or $900/month
Customers churned / year
220
Failed payment events / month
18
Do nothing
No retries, no dunning sequence
Recovered
$0
$10,800 still lost
Stripe Smart Retries only
~38% recovery rate, no email sequence
Recovered
$4,104
$6,696 still lost
Rebounce (dunning + SMS + WhatsApp)
60-80% recovery - decline code classification, multi-channel
Recovered
$7,560
$3,240 still lost
What Rebounce could recover
That's $3,456/yr more than what Stripe Smart Retries alone would recover, by combining smart retries, decline-code-aware dunning emails, SMS, WhatsApp, and checkout recovery.
Monthly loss = MRR × failure rate. Failure rate is the % of attempted subscription charges that fail in a given month. The SaaS industry average is ~9% per Recurly's State of Subscriptions report.
Customers lost assumes un-recovered failures eventually churn. Churn lag is usually 7-30 days after the final failed attempt.
Stripe Smart Retries recovery (~38%) is Stripe's own published figure. It covers retries but not dunning emails, SMS, WhatsApp, or checkout recovery.
Rebounce recovery (60-80%) is the observed range for SaaS using smart retries + decline-code-based dunning + multi-channel follow-up (email, SMS, WhatsApp, in-app). The 70% midpoint is used here. Actual recovery depends on your customer base, pricing, and decline code mix.
Failed subscription payments are the single largest source of churn for most SaaS businesses, and it is almost entirely invisible unless you look for it. A customer with a valid card, active product usage, and zero intent to leave silently churns because their bank declined a recurring charge, the card expired, or the bank flagged the transaction as unusual.
Recurly's State of Subscriptions research found that involuntary churn from failed payments accounts for 20-40% of total SaaS churn. Stripe publishes that its Smart Retries feature recovers about 38% of failed payments out of the box. That means the other 62% of those failures become lost revenue unless something else is in place.
A dedicated dunning tool combines retries with decline-code-specific messaging, multi-channel follow-up (email, SMS, WhatsApp, in-app), and checkout recovery. The typical recovery rate jumps from 38% to 60-80%. The calculator above shows the gap in dollars for your specific numbers.
1. Classify every decline
Read the Stripe decline code and apply a different strategy per code. Retrying an expired card 4 times wastes API calls; retrying insufficient_funds on the 1st of the month recovers 70%+.
Decline code reference2. Run a sequenced dunning email flow
One email recovers ~15% of failures. A 4-email sequence over 14 days recovers 40-60%, especially with subject lines customized by decline reason.
Dunning email templates3. Add non-email channels
WhatsApp has 90%+ open rates. SMS has 45-50%. Email is 20-30%. Multi-channel on the same sequence compounds recovery by 15-25 percentage points.
WhatsApp recovery guide4. Stop retrying hard declines
Hard declines like expired_card, stolen_card, or fraudulent will never succeed on retry. Skip the retry and send a card update request immediately - every day of delay increases churn.
Why Stripe retries alone failInvoluntary churn is when a paying subscriber is dropped because their payment failed and was never recovered, even though they did not actively cancel. The most common causes are expired cards, insufficient funds, soft network errors, and 3DS authentication failures. Recurly research puts involuntary churn at 20-40% of total SaaS churn.
For most consumer SaaS, monthly invoice failure rates land between 5% and 15%. B2B SaaS with corporate cards tends to be 2-5%. Plans with longer billing cycles (annual) see lower failure rates because cards expire less often. If you have not measured yours, 9% is a reasonable starting estimate.
Recovered revenue is the dollar amount of failed charges that eventually succeed (via retry, card update, or new payment method). Prevented churn is the customer LTV preserved by keeping that customer subscribed - typically 6-24x the recovered charge depending on your retention curve.
Stripe Smart Retries are timing-only - they retry the same card at machine-learned intervals. They do not handle hard declines (which need a card-update flow), they do not message customers via email/SMS/WhatsApp, and they do not surface in-app banners or checkout recovery. The ~38% figure is consistent across published Stripe data and third-party benchmarks (ProfitWell, Baremetrics).
Layer four things on top of retries: (1) email sequences with payment-update links, (2) SMS or WhatsApp follow-ups (90%+ open rate), (3) in-app banners that catch logged-in users, and (4) a checkout-recovery flow for hard declines. Each channel adds ~5-15 percentage points. Combined, top SaaS dunning tools recover 60-80% of failed payments.
Stop losing revenue
Smart retries, decline-code-aware dunning emails, SMS, WhatsApp, in-app banners, checkout recovery, and cancellation flows. From $3.50/mo. 5-minute Stripe setup. 3-day free trial.