Failed-payment recovery
A 4-step email sequence you can edit word for word. Sent from your business name, replies go to your inbox. Never emails someone who’s already paid.
For solo founders on Stripe
Recover failed Stripe payments on autopilot.
When a customer’s card fails, Failpilot emails them a one-click link to fix it: four friendly reminders, sent from your business name. You keep the customer and the revenue.
- Free until it has recovered your first $100
- $9/mo flat after that, cancel anytime
- No card needed to start
Cards expire. Banks decline. Customers who wanted to pay quietly churn.
~22%of SaaS churn is involuntary, caused by failed paymentsStripe data via Churnkey, 2025 ↗
~42%of declines are “insufficient funds”: temporary, and worth a polite nudgeChurnkey State of Retention, 2025 ↗
How it works
Set up once. Runs forever.
About two minutes, no code, nothing to install.
- 1
Connect Stripe
Paste a restricted API key (read-only for Customers and Invoices). We set up the webhook for you. Revoke it any time in Stripe.
- 2
A payment fails
Failpilot sends up to four friendly emails over about two weeks, each with Stripe’s own secure card-update link. They stop the moment the invoice is paid.
- 3
You get paid
Recovered revenue shows up on your dashboard. Each Monday you get a digest: recovered, new and lost subscribers, and why people left.
One-click “why did you leave?”
When someone cancels, they get one question with one-tap answers. We sort the replies into price, features, usage, competitor and more.
Weekly digest
One email each Monday (when there’s something to report): revenue recovered, failures still open, new and lost subscriptions, and what leavers told you.
Honest ROIWill it pay for itself?
Will it pay for itself?
Plug in your number. Change our assumptions.
$
Assumptions (estimates, not promises. Edit them)
Industry estimate. Stripe data analysed by Churnkey (2025): SaaS loses about 8% of customers a year to involuntary churn, roughly 0.7% a month. Recurly’s 2025 B2B benchmark is 0.8%. Source ↗ Recurly via Vitally ↗
Our assumption, not a measured result. Churnkey says ~70% of failed payments are recoverable with retries plus reminders, but Stripe’s own retries already take a share, so we assume a smaller slice. Your results will differ.
Lost to failed payments / month$70
Failpilot might win back / month$9
Failpilot cost$9
Estimated net / month$0
Saved customers keep paying month after month, so one rescued $49 subscriber is worth $49 every month they stay. This calculator only counts one month. It’s an estimate for planning, not a guarantee.
Pricing
$9 a month. Flat.
Free until Failpilot has recovered your first $100. After that, $9/mo for everything, however big you get.
Failpilot
$9/month, flat
Free until your first $100 is recovered. No card to start.
- 4-step failed-payment emails
- One-click cancellation survey
- Weekly digest
- Editable templates, your business name
Others in this spacelist prices, checked 27 Oct 2026
Churn BusterDunning or cancel flows, plan set by your MRR
from $269/mopricing ↗
ChurnkeyStarter: cancel flows + payment recovery
$300/mo monthly
$250 billed yearlypricing ↗
$250 billed yearlypricing ↗
Baremetrics RecoverAdd-on. Needs a Baremetrics plan (from $75/mo)
+$129/mopricing ↗
Fair warning: they do more. SMS, in-app paywalls, A/B tests, analytics, human support and teams of people behind them. Failpilot is deliberately small: one job, done for $9, for solo founders who just want failed payments handled.
What Failpilot doesn’t do (so you can decide fast)
- It doesn’t retry cards itself. Stripe’s Smart Retries keep doing that.
- No SMS, in-app banners or paywalls, and no A/B testing.
- One Stripe account per login for now.
FAQ
Straight answers
Doesn’t Stripe already email customers about failed payments?
Stripe can retry cards and send basic failed-payment emails, and you should keep that on. Failpilot adds a longer, friendlier sequence in your own voice with a card-update link, a “why did you leave?” survey, and a weekly digest. If Stripe’s emails already recover everything for you, you may not need this. That’s why it’s free until it’s recovered $100.
Is it safe to give you a Stripe key?
You create a restricted key (we reject full secret keys) with just: Customers (read), Invoices (read) and, optionally, Webhook endpoints (write) so we can set up the webhook for you. It’s encrypted at rest (AES-256-GCM), never shown again, and you can disconnect or roll the key in Stripe at any time. We can’t charge cards or move money with it.
How do you count “recovered” and the free $100?
An invoice counts as recovered only if it was paid after we’d sent at least one reminder. Invoices paid before our first email don’t count, even if they were retried successfully by Stripe. We can’t perfectly separate “paid because of our email” from “paid because the bank approved a retry”, so treat it as an upper bound. Non-USD amounts are converted at rough fixed rates for the $100 allowance only.
Where do the emails come from?
They’re sent through Resend from our sending domain, with your business name as the sender name and your support address as Reply-To. Replies land in your inbox. Custom sending domains are on the roadmap.
What happens after the free $100?
Reminders pause until you subscribe at $9/month through Stripe Checkout. Nothing is lost: queued reminders go out as soon as you upgrade. Cancel any time from the dashboard.
Does it work with test mode?
Yes. Connect a test-mode restricted key (rk_test_…) to try the whole flow with Stripe’s test clocks and test cards before going live.
Who’s behind this?
An independent, very small product. It isn’t affiliated with or endorsed by Stripe, Resend, or any competitor named on this page. Competitor prices are their published list prices on the date shown and may change.
Stop losing customers to expired cards.
Connect Stripe in two minutes. Free until it’s recovered your first $100.