What it is.
Payments fail for reasons that are often temporary: an expired card, a bank block, insufficient funds on the wrong day. Stripe Billing retries those failed subscription and invoice payments for you.
You configure it in the Dashboard under Billing, then Revenue recovery, then Retries. Smart Retries picks the retry timing from Stripe's own data on when a similar payment is likely to succeed, so you aren't guessing at a schedule.
The reason to bother with this before any win-back campaign: these customers never decided to leave.
What you get.
- Automatic retries on failed subscription and invoice payments.
- Retry timing chosen from Stripe's data on when payments succeed.
- Dashboard configuration, so no engineering work to enable it.
- Recovery analytics showing what the retries brought back.
- A reduction in churn that needed no marketing campaign.
How to set it up.
Open the Dashboard and go to Billing, then Revenue recovery, then Retries.
Turn on Smart Retries so the timing comes from Stripe's data instead of a schedule you invented.
Set what happens when retries run out, since cancel and leave-unpaid are very different outcomes.
Configure the one-time invoice retries separately under the advanced invoicing settings.
Pair retries with the automated customer emails, because some declines need the customer to act.
Read recovery analytics after a month and compare recovered revenue against your churn number.
Use cases
Recover an involuntary cancellation
Let the retries run on a card that failed for a reason nobody chose.
Use the timing data
Take the retry schedule from what works instead of picking days.
Stop counting a decline as churn
Separate the failed cards from the customers who left on purpose.
Best for
Any subscription business on Stripe
It's a configuration setting and it recovers revenue you already earned.
Churn that looks worse than it is
If your churn number includes failed cards, you're measuring your payment setup and calling it product.
Before building win-back
Recovering a declined card is cheaper than winning back somebody who chose to leave.