How Much Revenue Are Failed Payments Costing You?
Some of your churn comes from customers who never chose to leave: their card expired, hit a limit, or was flagged. Enter a few numbers from your billing dashboard to see what those failed renewals cost you, using only your own figures.
Your failed-payment losses
The lifetime value figure is an upper bound: it assumes every renewal you never recover ends that subscription, and some customers may come back on their own.
Estimates are based on published industry averages and are not a quote. Actual rates depend on card mix, ticket size, industry, and underwriting.
What if you recovered more failed renewals?
Estimates are based on published industry averages and are not a quote. Actual rates depend on card mix, ticket size, industry, and underwriting.
A payments specialist can walk through how your recurring charges, retries, and stored cards are set up today.
How this works
Subscription churn has two very different causes. Voluntary churn is a customer deciding to cancel. Involuntary churn is a customer you lose because a renewal charge failed: the card expired, was replaced after fraud, hit its limit, or was declined by the issuer for another reason. Many billing dashboards lump both into one churn number, so owners rarely see how much of their loss comes from payments rather than from product or price. This calculator isolates the payment side using only numbers you enter.
The math is straightforward. Your subscribers times your average monthly charge gives the recurring revenue you bill each month. Multiply that by your first-attempt failure rate to get revenue at risk. Of that, the share you never recover through retries, reminder emails, or card updates is revenue actually lost. Because a subscriber whose renewal is never recovered often stops paying altogether, the calculator also multiplies each lost subscriber by the months they would have stayed, showing the lifetime value at stake. That lifetime figure assumes every unrecovered failure ends the subscription, so treat it as an upper bound.
Hypothetical example: a subscription box with 2,000 subscribers paying $30 a month, an 8% first-attempt failure rate, and a 40% recovery rate bills $60,000 a month. It has $4,800 a month at risk and never collects $2,880 a month, or $34,560 a year. If those subscribers would have stayed 14 more months, the upper-bound lifetime value lost from one year of unrecovered failures is $483,840.
The what-if slider lets you test a recovery improvement of your choosing rather than a benchmark. Common levers include smarter retry timing, handling soft declines (like insufficient funds) differently from hard declines (like a closed account), reminding customers before their card expires, and using account updater services that refresh stored card details. Results are estimates, not a quote; actual outcomes depend on your customers, card mix, platform, and processor.
The assumptions behind your numbers
Frequently asked questions
What is involuntary churn?
Involuntary churn is losing a subscriber because their payment failed, not because they decided to cancel. Common causes are expired or reissued cards, insufficient funds, credit limits, and issuer fraud flags. It is worth tracking separately because the fixes are operational (retries, reminders, card updates) rather than product or pricing changes.
Where do I find my first-attempt failure rate?
Most subscription apps and gateways report failed or past-due renewals. Take the number of renewal charges that failed on the first try in a typical month and divide by the total renewal charges attempted that month. If your platform only shows final outcomes, check the payment or invoice logs for first-attempt status.
Why is the lifetime value number so much larger than the annual loss?
Annual revenue lost counts only the single failed charge each time. Lifetime value lost assumes the subscriber who was never recovered stops paying for all the months they would have stayed. That assumption makes it an upper bound, since some customers come back on their own, but it shows why each unrecovered failure costs more than one payment.
How much should I expect to improve my recovery rate?
This tool does not assume a typical improvement because results vary widely by customer base, price point, platform, and how recovery is handled today. Use the slider to test a range, then measure the effect of each change (retry timing, reminder emails, card updater) in your own data.
Does a card updater service work with my platform?
Availability depends on your processor, gateway, and subscription app rather than the cart alone. Ask your provider whether they support account updater or network tokenization for stored cards, whether it runs automatically, and whether there is a per-update fee. The gated playbook includes the questions to ask.
Is this a quote from TouchSuite?
No. Estimates are based on published industry averages and are not a quote. Actual rates depend on card mix, ticket size, industry, and underwriting. The calculator uses only the numbers you enter and does not include any processing rates.