Frequently Asked Questions

Involuntary churn occurs when a customer loses access to your service not because they chose to cancel, but because their payment failed. The most common causes are expired credit cards (responsible for ~25% of failures), insufficient funds, bank-side declines, and payment processor errors. Industry data shows that the average SaaS loses 9% of monthly recurring revenue to involuntary churn — revenue that is fully recoverable with the right dunning strategy.

PaymentRescue uses a three-layer recovery approach. First, smart retry logic retries failed charges at statistically optimal times based on day-of-week and card type patterns. Second, an automated dunning email sequence sends personalized messages at day 0, day 3, and day 7 to prompt customers to update their payment details. Third, real-time analytics give you full visibility into each recovery attempt so you can track performance and fine-tune your strategy.

Stripe's built-in Smart Retries uses a generic retry schedule that is the same for every merchant. PaymentRescue goes further with dunning email sequences — Stripe does not send any recovery emails on your behalf. PaymentRescue also provides per-customer analytics, customizable email templates with your brand, and a dedicated recovery dashboard. The result is a 30–50% recovery rate versus the 8–12% that Stripe retries alone typically achieve.

Setup takes under 10 minutes. You connect your Stripe account via OAuth (no code changes required), configure your dunning email sequence using our pre-built templates, and PaymentRescue begins monitoring for failed payments immediately. There is no SDK to install and no webhooks to configure manually — PaymentRescue handles all the Stripe API communication automatically.

PaymentRescue customers typically recover 30–50% of failed payments. The exact rate depends on your customer base, average subscription value, and how quickly customers respond to dunning emails. For a conservative estimate, our ROI calculator uses 40%. Even at the low end of 30%, PaymentRescue delivers a strong return: a SaaS with $20,000 MRR and 9% involuntary churn would recover roughly $648/month — far exceeding the cost of the plan.

PaymentRescue is optimized for Stripe subscription billing, where recurring failed payments are most damaging to MRR. It monitors all Stripe invoice payment failures linked to active subscriptions. One-time payment failures are visible in the analytics dashboard, but the automated dunning sequences are designed for subscription contexts where the customer relationship is ongoing and recovery emails make the most sense.