Failed-payment revenue calculator
How much is failed payments costing your SaaS?
Roughly 1 in 11 subscription charges fail every month — expired cards, insufficient funds, fraud blocks. Most of those customers wanted to pay. Without a real dunning flow, that revenue just silently churns. See your number below.
Why this happens
Failed payments are a leak, not an event
Involuntary churn is the revenue you lose without a customer ever deciding to leave. It hides inside your numbers because each failure is small — but they compound every single month.
~9% of charges fail monthly
Across subscription businesses, roughly 9% of recurring payments fail in a given month.
Mostly expired & declined cards
Expirations, insufficient funds, and issuer fraud blocks — not customers choosing to cancel.
20–40% of churn is involuntary
A large slice of total churn comes from payments failing, not from dissatisfaction.
Smart Retries recover ~38%
Stripe's built-in Smart Retries claw back about 38% of failed charges on their own.
Dunning recovers 60–80%
A dedicated flow — retry timing plus card-update emails, SMS, and in-app nudges — recovers far more.
It compounds yearly
Recovered subscribers keep paying. The gap between 38% and 70% is real revenue, every month, all year.
How the math works
Three numbers, one clear answer
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Revenue at risk
Your MRR × the failure rate = the recurring revenue exposed to involuntary churn each month.
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What you keep vs. lose
Your current recovery rate splits the at-risk revenue into recovered and lost — that loss is the leak.
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What dunning wins back
Lifting to your target rate recovers more of the same revenue. The difference is the prize, monthly and annual.
The Copper Bay Labs suite
RecoverFlow is one of five free checks for indie SaaS
Free, browser-based tools for vibe-coded and indie products, from Copper Bay Labs.
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ShipSafe →
Will you get sued? Checks your site for ADA accessibility and privacy-law exposure.
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LeakCheck →
Did you leak a secret in your code? Finds exposed API keys and tokens before you commit.
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ExposureCheck →
Is your live site leaking? Scans a running URL for exposed files and headers.
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DepCheck →
Are your dependencies risky? Flags vulnerable and abandoned npm packages.
FAQ
Questions, answered
Where do these benchmark numbers come from?
The defaults reflect widely cited subscription-payments research: roughly 9% of recurring charges fail monthly, 20–40% of churn is involuntary (failed payments rather than cancellations), Stripe's built-in Smart Retries recover about 38% of failed charges, and a dedicated dunning flow recovers 60–80%. They're starting points, not gospel — every input is editable, so plug in your own data the moment you have it. See How it works for the full methodology and sources.
Is this an exact figure I can take to the bank?
No — it's an estimate, and a deliberately simple one. It models a steady-state month: MRR × failure rate gives revenue at risk, and your recovery rates split that into kept versus lost. It doesn't model the compounding effect of a recovered customer staying for many more months (which makes the real number larger), nor seasonal swings or your exact card mix. Treat it as a credible order-of-magnitude, not an audited forecast.
Do you store the numbers I type?
No. RecoverFlow runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter is uploaded, logged, or stored — there's no backend, no database, and no analytics on your inputs. Close the tab and it's gone. You can disconnect from the internet after the page loads and the calculator still works.
What actually lifts recovery from 38% to 70%?
Built-in retries only retry the card. A real dunning flow adds the human side: smart retry timing (retrying when payday or a topped-up balance is likely), card-update prompts over email and SMS, in-app banners for active users, and graceful escalation before access is cut. Each channel recovers customers the others miss, which is how dedicated tools reach the 60–80% range. That paid recovery engine is what Copper Bay Labs is building next — get on the list →