JakeVacovec

Part of our process is to ensure this is covered in the terms and we encourage all merchants to explicitly show this in the product for visibility but also because a significant percentage of customers will add a backup to avoid risk of downtime.

Love the actionable feedback! Thank you

It's actually the opposite, we see about 50% of a customers LTV happens after a recovery event. Many services leveraging backup payment methods stem from customer feedback of not wanting downtime (e.g. losing access to wireless or your internet, etc.) it's inefficient and backups are an easy way to address.

Intuitively you'd think that would be the case but in practice once a subscription stops, a large share of customers don’t come back even if they were active. We see three buckets: 1. Customer shops and finds an alternative (Claude instead of ChatGPT) 2. Customer is pissed off about downtime and leaves 3. Nice to have and customer may reactivate later or must have and reactivates/shops

Ultimately, you want to retain customers that want to use your product. If they don't they will actively cancel. We don't prevent or get involved with customers that actively cancel.

That’s a fair concern — we definitely thought about the ethics side. In practice is that most “failed payment” churn isn’t intentional churn. Customers still want the service, but their primary card expired, was replaced, or hit a limit.

When we tested this, refunds and chargebacks were actually lower for the recovered cohort compared to baseline.

For customers who really don’t want the subscription anymore, they can still cancel as usual.

We do have a pricing page however it's geared towards giving an estimation on how much additional we can generate for a merchant with our average improvement against industry average failure and recovery rates.

We tailor pricing to provide a double digit ROI since there's a huge range between each businesses metrics. For example, take two businesses with $4M MRR and one has a payment failure rate of 25% ($1m/mo) and the other has 5% ($200k/mo). We've found that Merchants are happiest with this approach as we also provide a free payment audit upfront to benchmark historical performance, estimate our impact, and set price. This way the benchmark, targets, and ROI are completely transparent.

Good feedback - if a potential customer's first interaction with us makes them nauseous that's not great :)

It's fairly easy to measure performance. For companies with 100's of thousands or millions in failed payments each month 5-10% performance gains have a huge impact. On average we're improving recovery rate by 21%. To hold ourselves accountable we offer customers a full-refund if they're not satisfied with gains. We haven't had to give a refund yet.

A few key areas where our differences are advantages (in our pov): 1. We handle recovery e2e (both retries & communications) 2. We provide detailed real-time analytics on performance 3. Higher ROI (cost less and are directly responsible for more recoveries) 4. They're competing to be the card vault (replace Stripe, Adyen, Spreedly, etc. vault) whereas our vision is revenue optimization from initial authorization to recovery (complimentary to any stack)

More often than not we can resolve the payment issue without any customer involvement. That's the ideal path. In many cases the system will delay sending communications if the chances of a recovery by retry drop below a certain level. It's best to avoid asking customers to do something if it may already be fixed. Your bank still may notify you but that depends on your country and bank.

We don't guess a customer's language. Typically our Merchants have a single default language but since our Merchants are global it's important that the various messages we send can be available in different languages. If they have multiple instances for different geo's we can segment by language.

Our transactional emails have incredible deliverability scores and extremely low spam rates. They come from the merchants domain and are lightweight to ensure they go to the right inbox vs. ending up in promotion. For transactional sms we handle the compliance and each Merchant get's their own dedicated #.

Regarding pricing, each Merchant has different volume, failure rates, and recovery rates. Since we guarantee our ROI we have to tailor our pricing to them. We're working to make it easier so this is helpful feedback.

Not that I'm aware of. Depending on your size we can provide a solid start up discount :)

Our Merchants can configure the recovery period and messaging to their liking and we ensure there's strict adherence to the compliance and regulatory rules set by card networks.

Ethics and honor are great things but keep in mind we're not a collections agency that's buying bad debt off companies for pennies on the dollar to chase, which sounds like the experience you're referring to.

It's a diminishing returns problem... If they charge 2.9% + $.30 as their standard pricing, they are only keeping a small % of that as the issuer (Chase) gets the largest piece of the pie and the network (Visa) takes their cut too. If each declined authorization costs Stripe $.25, each attempt chips away at their margin.