What are failed payments costing you?
Some members don’t cancel. Their card does. See how many you lose to declined renewals, and what getting more of those payments back is worth.
The churn nobody chose.
A member who cancels made a decision. A member whose card failed may not have noticed. Three numbers decide how many of them you lose.
Members × fail rate
Renewals that fail
Cards expire, hit their limit or get flagged by the bank. Every month a slice of renewals is declined on the first try, whatever you do.
Failed × recovery rate
The ones you get back
Retries, reminder emails and a card update page turn a decline into a payment. Whatever isn't recovered becomes a cancelled subscription.
Price ÷ churn
What each one was worth
A member lost to a failed card doesn't just miss one payment. They miss every payment they'd have made for the rest of their stay.
In Recurly’s churn benchmarks (July 2026 network data), failed payments are 32–38% of churn in each of the six industries it reports, and 33% for SaaS. It’s the one kind of churn you can cut without changing your product.
Four fixes that get you paid.
Most of these are settings, not projects. Memberstack takes payments through your own Stripe account, so you switch them on in Stripe.
Retry on a schedule
Many declines are temporary, so trying again later works. Stripe's recommended Smart Retries setting is 8 tries within 2 weeks before the subscription is cancelled.
Email when it fails
Tell the member their payment didn't go through, in plain words, with one link to fix it. Stripe can send these for you when a payment fails.
A page to update the card
The email is only as good as where it lands. Give members a way to change their card from their account, without logging a support ticket.
Warn before a card expires
Expired cards are the most predictable failure there is. Stripe can email members about expiring cards, and updates many card numbers automatically when a bank issues a new one.
Source: Stripe, “Revenue recovery” and “Automate payment retries”
Fewer members leaving means more of your signups count toward growth. See what it does to your revenue goal.
What this calculator leaves out.
It's built to show the size of the leak clearly. Here's where that costs accuracy.
Steady months
Failures come in bursts: a batch of cards expiring, a bank tightening its fraud rules. The model spreads them evenly, which gets the total right and the timing wrong.
One price, monthly
An annual renewal that fails loses a whole year's payment at once. If you have several plans, use what the average member pays a month.
Recovery isn't free
A recovery tool has a monthly cost and some retries take a fee. Compare those with the 'worth a month' figure before you pay for one.
Questions about failed payments
What involuntary churn is, what a good recovery rate looks like, and what happens to the numbers you type in.
Involuntary churn is members you lose because a payment failed, not because they decided to cancel. A card expires, hits its limit or gets flagged by the bank, the renewal is declined, and if nobody gets it paid the subscription ends. In Recurly's July 2026 churn benchmarks, it's about a third of all churn in every industry reported: 33% for SaaS. It's churn you can cut without changing your product, because the member never chose to leave.
Multiply your paying members by the share of renewals that fail and the share of those you don't recover. With 500 members, 4% of renewals failing and 35% recovered, you lose 13 members a month to failed cards: $260 of revenue at $20 a month, and more like $3,700 once you count what they'd have paid over the rest of their stay at 7% churn. The calculator works it out for your own numbers, and what a better recovery rate adds over two years.
Stripe says businesses using it recover 55% of failed payments on average, through retries, card updates and emails. That's Stripe's own figure, and it doesn't publish how it's measured, so treat it as a rough marker rather than a target. Your own recovery rate is in the Stripe dashboard under Billing, Revenue recovery: the share of failed subscription payment volume later recovered by any means. The calculator shows what each extra point is worth to you.
Turn on automatic retries, so a declined renewal is tried again: Stripe's Smart Retries pick the timing, and its recommended default is 8 tries within 2 weeks. Email the member when a payment fails, with a link straight to a page where they can update their card. Warn members before a card expires. Stripe also updates many saved cards automatically when a bank issues a new number. And don't cancel on the first failure: give the retries time to work.
Dunning is the process of collecting a payment that failed: retrying the charge, emailing the customer and giving them a way to update their card before the subscription is cancelled. Good dunning recovers members who never meant to leave. Stripe Billing includes retries and failed-payment emails, which you configure in the Stripe dashboard.
Memberstack takes payments through your own Stripe account, so Stripe's retry and failed-payment email settings apply to your members' subscriptions. Set them up in your Stripe dashboard under Billing, and give members a way to update their card from their account page.
It uses one price and steady monthly rates for signups, cancellations and failed payments. Real failures come in bursts, such as a batch of cards expiring at once, and an annual renewal that fails loses a whole year's payment. It counts revenue before payment fees, and it doesn't count what a recovery tool costs: compare that to the 'worth a month' figure.
No. Every calculation runs in your browser, and nothing you type is sent to Memberstack or anyone else. "Copy link" puts your numbers in the page's URL so you can share them if you choose to.
Built by the team at Memberstack, where over 10,000 businesses run their memberships.