Automated Dunning
Stripe dunning automation with a human review step
Failed payment recovery has two jobs: retry the charge at the right moment, and get the customer to update the card. Stripe is good at the first part. StayPaid adds the second part — without turning your customers into a drip campaign.
What is automated dunning?
Automated dunning is software that detects a failed subscription payment and follows up on its own: retrying the charge at the right time and emailing the customer to update their card. Done well, it recovers revenue that would otherwise silently become involuntary churn.
Most failed payments aren't customers leaving — they're expired cards, bank hiccups, and bad timing. That's why dunning automation works at all: the customer usually wants to stay. They just need a nudge that actually reaches them.
What automation does well — and where it breaks
Machines win at
- Detecting a failed charge the second it happens
- Retry timing based on the decline reason
- Sequencing: day 1, 3, 7, 14 without you tracking anything
- Never forgetting, never being too busy
Machines lose at
- Emails that sound like a cron job wrote them
- no-reply addresses customers have trained themselves to ignore
- Knowing when a big customer deserves a real conversation
- Knowing when to stop pushing and let one go
Keep Stripe Smart Retries. Add the human layer it's missing.
Smart Retries is worth leaving on forever — it recovers the easy mechanical failures for free. The gap is everything that needs a customer to do something: expired cards, replaced cards, stale billing details, and SCA friction. That's where StayPaid sits.
Related: Stripe Smart Retries vs. a dunning tool · pricing vs. recovered MRR
The hybrid: automated mechanics, human messages
StayPaid automates everything on the left column and keeps you in the right one. When a payment fails, we detect it on the next hourly Stripe sync, schedule the retry, and draft a short personal email, from your address, in your voice. You approve it with one click, or edit it first. The customer gets a message that reads like a founder who noticed, not a billing system that fired.
Want full automation for specific payments? Opt in per payment and we'll run the whole sequence hands-off. That's the founder-in-the-loop approach: manual by default, automated where you choose.
How automated dunning works in StayPaid
- 1
A payment fails
StayPaid finds the failure on the next hourly Stripe sync and reads the decline code: expired card, insufficient funds, SCA friction, or a plain bank decline.
- 2
Automation handles the mechanics
The retry is scheduled based on the failure reason, and the 4-email recovery sequence (day 1, 3, 7, 14) is queued up.
- 3
You review the message
A personal email is drafted from your address. One click approves it. Thirty seconds if you want to add a line about their account.
- 4
The customer updates their card
Because the email came from a human, it gets opened and acted on. The retry lands on a working card. MRR saved.
Full sequence details: failed payment recovery docs · manual vs automated dunning
Automated dunning FAQ
What is automated dunning?
Automated dunning is software that detects a failed subscription payment and follows up without you lifting a finger: retrying the charge at a smart time and emailing the customer to update their card. The goal is recovering revenue you'd otherwise lose to involuntary churn.
Is fully automated dunning worth it?
The automation part, yes — detecting failures automatically and timing retries is where machines genuinely win. The messaging part is where full automation falls apart: template emails from no-reply addresses get ignored. Automated mechanics plus a human-reviewed message outperforms both pure manual and pure automated setups.
Does StayPaid automate the emails too?
By default, no — StayPaid drafts the recovery emails and you approve them with one click, so every message sounds like you. If you want full automation for specific payments, you can opt in per payment. You keep control; the robots do the boring parts.
How is this different from Stripe Smart Retries?
Stripe Smart Retries only retries the charge — it never talks to your customer. Many failures (expired cards, replaced cards, SCA friction) can't be fixed by retrying. StayPaid combines retry timing with personal emails that get the card updated.
Is Stripe Smart Retries enough on its own?
It is a great free layer for mechanical failures, and you should keep it on. But it cannot recover a customer whose card no longer exists, and it cannot write to them in your voice. StayPaid handles that human recovery layer while Stripe keeps retrying in the background.
Automated where it counts. Human where it matters.
Start Free — First 3 recoveries