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failed cards eat 3.8% of mrr every month and smart retries recover half Dunning
410 active subscriptions between $19 and $49, roughly $11.4k MRR. Every month about $430 of invoices fail on the first charge. Automatic retries get back around $225 of it, so I am losing something like $205 a month permanently, which is 1.8% of MRR walking out for reasons that have nothing to do with the product.
Current setup is close to default: retries on the standard schedule, three dunning emails, subscription cancels after the retry window. I do not pause access during the window, they just keep using it and then vanish.
Questions I have not been able to answer from the docs:
- is 3.8% initial failure rate high? It feels high.
- does retry timing actually matter, or is that folklore?
- do people cut off access during dunning or leave it on?
Self-serve, mostly US and EU cards, no enterprise invoicing.
@petra_lindqvist · 5d ago
Our split for what it's worth, ~2,900 failed invoices over a year: insufficient_funds 41%, do_not_honor 23%, expired_card 19%, lost/stolen 6%, everything else the rest. The do_not_honor bucket was the one where a different card actually solved it about a third of the time.
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