Involuntary churn: the quietest 5% of your MRR
Voluntary churn gets all the attention because customers announce it. Involuntary churn — cards that expire, banks that decline, subscriptions that lapse in silence — is usually larger and far cheaper to fix, because those customers still want your product.
Measure it before you fix it
Split churned MRR into two buckets: cancellations initiated by the customer, and subscriptions ended by a payment failure. If you have never split them, expect the second bucket to be between a third and a half of the total.
A retry schedule that respects bank behaviour
Immediate retries mostly fail again. Spacing matters more than volume: retry at day 1, 3, 5, 8 and 12, avoid retrying twice in the same 24 hours, and prefer weekday mornings for accounts on monthly salary cycles.
Email is a payments channel
Every retry should be paired with a message that has one job: a single link to update the card. No marketing, no upsell, no PDF. Send from a real address that accepts replies — a chunk of recovery comes from customers replying to ask what happened.
Pre-dunning beats dunning
Cards expire on a known date. Emailing seven days before expiry recovers customers who would otherwise never see a failure at all, and it costs nothing.
Close the loop
Track recovery rate per attempt, not just overall. If attempts 4 and 5 recover nothing, cut them. If they recover 2%, extend the schedule. Revenue Leak AI reports uncollected invoices and recovery rate as a priced finding each audit, so the number stays in front of you.