What Stripe does on its own when a subscription payment fails
Before you pay for any failed-payment tool, turn on what Stripe already gives you. Stripe Billing has retries, customer emails, and card updates built in, and most of it is a setting, not code. Here is what each piece does, based on Stripe’s own documentation, and what it still leaves to you.
1. Smart Retries
When a subscription invoice fails, Stripe can retry the charge automatically. Smart Retries uses Stripe’s model to pick retry times that are more likely to succeed. For new Stripe accounts, Stripe turns Smart Retries on by default with up to 8 retries within 2 weeks. You can choose a window of 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks, 1 month, or 2 months, or switch to a custom schedule of up to three retries. Subscriptions created through Payment Links are covered too. (Stripe: Automate payment retries)
You’ll find it under Billing → Revenue recovery → Retries in the Dashboard.
2. What retries can’t fix
Stripe doesn’t retry when there’s no payment method on file, and it can’t successfully retry a hard decline. Stripe lists codes such as lost_card, stolen_card, incorrect_number, pickup_card, and authentication_required. For those, retries stay scheduled but only go through once the customer adds a new payment method. In other words, the customer has to act. (Same Stripe page.)
3. What happens when retries run out
You choose the end state in your retry settings: cancel the subscription, mark it unpaid, leave it past due, or pause it if it’s eligible. After the final attempt, Stripe stops trying. Many small businesses never look at this setting, so the default decides how a failed card turns into a lost customer. It’s worth picking on purpose.
4. Customer emails
Stripe can email customers for you, and these emails link to a page where they can update their payment method. Settings worth turning on (Stripe: Automate customer emails):
- Failed payment notifications: an email after each failed card payment, with a link to fix it.
- Expiring card notifications: an email one month before the default card on file expires.
- Payment confirmation emails: for payments that need the customer to confirm, such as 3D Secure, plus optional reminders until they do.
- Renewal and trial-ending reminders, if those fit your plans.
The emails use your Stripe branding settings, but the wording and timing are Stripe’s templates.
5. Automatic card updates
When a bank issues a replacement card, for example after an expiry or a lost card, Stripe works with the card networks to update the saved details automatically. Stripe says this is widely supported for Visa, Mastercard, American Express, and Discover cards issued in the United States, that support elsewhere varies by country, and that you can’t tell in advance which cards will update. (Stripe: Cards overview, automatic card updates)
6. Recovery analytics and automations
Stripe also has recovery analytics (failure rates, recovery rates, and recent failed payments for top customers) and no-code automations, for example notifying your team when a high-value invoice is overdue. (Stripe: Revenue recovery)
What’s still left for you
Turn everything above on first. After that, the gaps that usually remain for a small subscription business are human ones:
- Hard declines need the customer to act. A template email is easy to ignore. A short note from a real person at your business often isn’t.
- Big accounts deserve a personal message. Stripe can alert you, but someone still has to write to the customer.
- The end-state decision. Someone should look at past-due accounts before they’re canceled, not after.
- One honest monthly number. How much failed, how much came back, and whether your follow-up is worth the time.
If you’d rather not do that by hand, that’s the layer Retryly is being built for: personal follow-ups from your brand on top of Stripe’s retries, not instead of them. It’s in early beta at a $19/month founding price. Want to size the problem first? Try the failed payment calculator.