Free calculator
Revenue lost to failed payments
Some members leave without ever deciding to: their card expires or a payment bounces and nobody follows up. See what that costs you each year.
Everything your members or subscribers are billed in a month.
Declined, expired or short-balance payments ÷ all recurring payments. Recurly found 5.4% of credit and 13% of recurring debit payments declined (sources below).
An example. Put in your own: what you collect after retries, reminders and members updating their card.
Failed payments cost you
$9,000 a year
Revenue you bill but never collect.
Revenue that fails first time
$18,000
each year, before any recovery
Better recovery brings back
$3,600
a year, at your target rate
Stripe found about a quarter of lapsed subscriptions end purely because a payment failed. Those are people who never chose to leave, which makes them the cheapest revenue to win back.
How this is worked out
Revenue that fails first time is your monthly recurring revenue × 12 × the share of payments that fail on the first attempt.
What you lose is the part of that you never collect: failing revenue × (100% − the share you recover). Better recovery is failing revenue × the difference between your target and today's recovery rate.
It treats each failed payment as one month's dues. In practice an uncollected payment often ends the membership too, so the real cost is usually higher.
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Where the starting numbers come from
- 13.0% of recurring debit card payments and 5.4% of credit card payments were declined — Recurly 2023 State of Subscriptions, reported by Digital Transactions
- About a quarter of lapsed subscriptions end purely because a payment failed — Stripe, How we built it: Smart Retries (2024)