Your platform already retries failed payments and sends an email. Whether that's enough depends on what a point of recovery rate is worth to you.
Native dunning is the failed payment recovery built into your subscription or billing platform. Churn Buster is a dedicated recovery layer that sits on top of your platform, run by a retention team, and priced to pay for itself at roughly a 1% improvement in recovery rate.
After almost 5 years using Churn Buster, we tested the latest Smart Dunning features from our subscription platform and saw a notable drop in performance. Switched back with renewed confidence.
Native dunning is a good starting point. It retries the charge, sends a failed payment email, and for some brands that covers it.
Churn Buster earns its place when a small change in recovery rate is worth paying for. Our fee is flat, set by your MRR, and comes out to about 1% of failed payment volume. If you believe there's more than a 1% improvement left in your recovery rate, the work pays for itself and everything past that is yours.
No single feature makes the difference. Someone is tuning retry strategy, outreach, deliverability, and campaign length to your account, measuring the result on completed cohorts, and watching for the quiet failures that native tools don't flag.
Use what your platform includes if any of these describe you.
We'll tell you this on a tour, too, and we'd rather you came back when the math works than signed up before it does.
We front-load retries where they succeed most, skip codes the networks say never to retry, and stay inside the card networks' cap of about 15 reattempts per card in 30 days. Where your platform owns the retry schedule, we line our campaign up with it and tune the length instead.
Many native tools send a notification each time a retry fails, or send one email at the first failure and go quiet through the rest of the window. We start with a quiet recovery window, then run a sequence tuned to the failure type: email first, then SMS Nudge, then an alert to your team before a high value customer churns.
Recovery email from a dedicated transactional pool on your own domain, separate from your marketing sender reputation and from any pool shared across a platform's merchant base. When recovery emails ride a marketing ESP or a shared pool, the symptom is a recovery rate carried almost entirely by retries, because the card update emails aren't arriving.
On Stripe and Braintree, our hosted card update page validates the new card in real time, handles 3D Secure where required, and pushes the card back to the customer's account so they don't re-enter it next cycle. Elsewhere we send the customer down the shortest card update path your platform provides.
Rolling Analysis tracks every failure to one of four outcomes on completed cohorts: recovered by retry, recovered by card update, cancelled, or lost. A recovery counts only when a payment clears. You can segment it, export it, and recompute it yourself.
Setup takes about an hour with our team on the call. Then a 45-day review and ongoing account maintenance: campaign length, copy, segments, offers. Safety Net (coming soon) watches your account against its own baseline: connection health, capture page and link health, decline code mix, send volume. It flags a quiet break in days, not when a churn spike surfaces it weeks later.
| Recovery area | Native dunning (typical) | Churn Buster |
|---|---|---|
| Retry logic | Fixed schedule or platform-wide model; same treatment for most declines | Decline-aware strategy, front-loaded, within network reattempt caps (where we control the retry) |
| Customer outreach | One email at first failure, or one per retry | Quiet window, then email → SMS Nudge → team alert, sequenced independently of retries |
| Sending infrastructure | Platform's shared pool, or your marketing ESP | Dedicated transactional pool on your own domain |
| Card update | Portal login, or an invoice link | Hosted page, real-time validation, 3D Secure, card pushed back to the account (Stripe, Braintree) |
| Reporting | Recovery rate by calendar month; stops when the flow is off | Rolling Analysis on completed cohorts, four outcomes, segmentable, exportable |
| Testing | Limited; some tools lock a strategy once it's active | A/B tests on campaign length, copy, offers, segments |
| Monitoring | No per account baseline monitoring | Safety Net (coming soon): per account baseline, quiet-failure alerts |
| Who tunes it | You | Our team, with you |
| Cost | Included with the platform | Flat monthly fee by MRR tier; ~1% of failed payment volume |
When the alternative costs $0, the only comparison that matters is marginal. For most accounts, the recovery rate improvement that covers our fee is about 1%.
Churn Buster fee / monthly failed payment volume = break-even improvement
If switching to native costs you one point of recovery rate, what does that point cost per month? On most accounts it's roughly what you pay us. A cut line item shows up on a bill. Lost recovery doesn't, so run the math on your own numbers before you consolidate.
See the pricing page for the current tiers, or bring the number to a tour and we will walk through it with you.
We tried our subscription platform's failed payment recovery to consolidate software and hopefully get even better recovery. We saw a decline in performance and moved back to Churn Buster.
Recovery usually dips for the first couple of months on a new stack, and the first rebill data is where it shows.
We can usually tell you which of three things it is from your dashboard: deliverability, retry schedule against your decline mix, or campaign length.
Bring your numbers to a tour and we'll tell you where failed payment recovery ranks against the rest of the list.
It is. Run the math in the section above, then decide.
Sentiment AI scores the reasons customers give in Cancel Flows so you can see which segments need attention. Safety Net (coming soon) uses pattern recognition against your account's own baseline to catch quiet failures a global threshold would miss. The Churn Buster MCP (coming soon) connects your recovery data to Claude or ChatGPT, so you can ask your account questions in plain language and have it flag what's worth a closer look. And our team uses AI-assisted analysis to compare your account against benchmarks across 1,000+ accounts and find where recovery has room.
Retry timing. Several platforms lead with AI-optimized retries. We've tested it, and we haven't seen the performance gain. There's no counterfactual for the retry that didn't run, so the claim isn't measurable, and the gains we can measure come from recency, frequency, and duration: retry soon, don't over-retry, run long enough.
Brands that leave a dedicated tool for native often cite time, not performance. Nobody on the team could keep up with it. So we run it with you, and you have a person to ask when a platform setting shifts or a decline spike shows up that your dashboard won't explain.
For more context on the work behind failed payment recovery, see our Dunning overview, Rolling Analysis, the four outcomes, recovery campaigns, and the Shopify dunning guide. When passive and active churn overlap, Cancel Flows helps connect the customer signal.
We see Churn Buster as a strategic partner for the long term. It's one of the few solutions we have that's never up for discussion when we talk about cutting costs, or looking at new tech to replace other tech.
For some brands, yes. If your failed payment volume is small, or a 1% change in recovery rate isn't worth a flat monthly fee to you, use what's included. It stops being enough when every point of recovery is worth more than the fee and nobody is tuning or watching the native setup.
Native dunning is the retry-and-email feature included with your subscription or billing platform. Churn Buster is a dedicated recovery layer: decline-aware retry strategy where we control the retry, outreach sequenced separately from retries, email on your own domain, a hosted card update page, Rolling Analysis on completed cohorts, and a team that tunes it with you.
Smart Retries handles retry timing. We add the tuned outreach sequence, a hosted card update page that pushes the card back to the customer, and cohort-based measurement on top of it. If Stripe's retries plus its default emails are recovering what you need, keep them. If not, that's where we start. See our Stripe dunning guide.
Yes, with one rule: one dunning campaign at a time, with the retry schedules coordinated. On platforms where we control retries, you align the platform schedule to our campaign. On platforms that own the retry schedule, we run the outreach and measurement around it. Either way you turn off the platform's failed payment emails so customers receive one sequence.
The fee is flat, set by your MRR tier, and comes out to about 1% of failed payment volume. Divide the fee by your monthly failed payment volume; that's the recovery rate improvement that makes us free. We don't publish a lift number, because lift depends on what's missing in your current setup. On a tour we'll look at yours.
A few settings, in most cases. You turn off your platform's failed payment emails, and on some platforms you align the retry schedule with our campaign. We walk through it with you during onboarding, which takes about an hour.
Across our accounts the median is around 50% of failed payments recovered, and top performers run 80% or higher. Your number depends on price point, billing cycle, customer mix, and what happens after each failure. How we define recovery rate.
Yes. Reconnecting takes about an hour. Bring your current numbers to a tour and we'll look at them with you.
A 30-minute tour with our team. We'll look at what your failed payments are doing today, where the recoverable revenue is, and whether native is already doing the job.
It felt different from the other demos, where the salespeople could be very pushy. This felt more like a conversation with a confident, friendly person.