Failed renewals
Failed renewals are churn you didn't choose.
A subscription payment fails: the customer's card expired, or their bank declined the renewal. Your retries fire at the wrong moment, the reminder email lands in spam, and a customer who wanted to stay is gone. It doesn't show up in your churn surveys, because they never decided to leave.
What usually causes it
- Cards that expire or get replaced, with no automatic card updates
- Retries on a fixed schedule that ignores why the payment failed
- Temporary declines treated the same as permanent ones
- Renewals that trigger an extra authentication step the customer never sees
- Failed-payment emails that are late, vague or never tested
What I check
- Your decline reasons, split into recoverable and final
- When and how often you retry, and what each retry recovers
- Whether network tokens and the card account updater are switched on
- Your failed-payment emails and in-app prompts
- How much yearly revenue is lost to involuntary churn
Typical fixes: retries based on the decline reason, network tokens and account updater, a reminder before cards expire, a simple card-update page, and a dunning tool set up properly.
Read more: Failed payments in SaaS: the revenue leak hiding in your churn numbers
How much do failed renewals cost you?
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