Business OpsA few weeks2 evidence points

Failed Payment Recovery

Win back the revenue small SaaS companies silently lose to expired cards.

$30–$200 per customer, per month

Overview

What this is

A layer on top of a company's payment processor that catches failed charges and actually does something about them: intelligent retry timing, a sequence of emails that does not read like a debt collector, a hosted page for updating a card, and a dashboard showing exactly how much was recovered. The pitch is a number, not a feature list.

The problem it solves

A meaningful slice of every subscription business's churn is not people deciding to leave — it is a card that expired. Those customers still want the product. Stripe retries a few times and then gives up, and unless someone has built a dunning sequence, that revenue is simply gone. Most small SaaS companies never get round to building one.

Why now

Payment processors expose everything needed through webhooks, so the integration is a weekend. The interesting part is the pricing model: you can charge a percentage of what you recover, which makes the purchase decision almost frictionless — the customer is spending money they would not otherwise have had.

The evidence

What to watch out for

You are touching someone's billing, which is the most sensitive system they have. A bug that emails the wrong customers about a failed payment is a trust catastrophe. Build the dry-run mode before you build the send.

A sensible starting stack

Stripe webhooks, Any web stack, Postgres, A transactional email provider

Keywords: dunning, failed payments, churn recovery, stripe, subscription billing, revenue recovery