Revenue recovery for subscription creators
Cards expire. Banks decline. The charge fails and the member silently drops. Stripe catches a good share of these on its own — we work what it misses, and the pile of people who lapsed and never came back. You only pay on what we add, measured against what you already recover today.
◆ Free · starts with a CSV, no account access · recover nothing, pay nothing
The leak
Open your dashboard and every lost member looks the same: cancelled. But a big slice of them never made a decision at all. Here's how the money disappears:
Expired card, new bank card, spending limit, a flaky decline. Nobody did anything wrong. Nobody was told.
Retries run on a schedule. Some land. When they don't, the subscription lapses and the member loses access.
To you it reads as "they left." To them, the subscription just… stopped. Most never come back on their own.
Industry-wide, involuntary churn is 20–40% of all subscription churn — roughly half of it starts with a failed card — and it added up to an estimated $129B lost across the subscription economy in a single year. It's the most recoverable money in your business, because these people didn't want to leave.
The honest math
Stripe says businesses using it recover about 55% of failed payments on average, through automatic retries and payment-failure emails. That part is already working, it's already yours, and we would never charge you for it. Here's what actually happens to a failed payment:
Automatic retries and failure emails do their job. Already yours. Never billed.
Stolen and fraudulent cards. Retrying these wastes effort and can trigger network penalties. We write them off.
Expired cards, insufficient funds, temporary declines that the default schedule gave up on. Still recoverable.
These proportions are industry averages, not yours. Your real split is sitting in your Stripe dashboard under Revenue Recovery — failure rate, recovery rate, and your top decline codes. Most people have never opened it. The audit starts by pulling your actual numbers, because a generic benchmark is worth nothing when the real figure is one click away.
Where we actually work
A generic retry cadence treats an expired card the same as a fraud flag. It isn't. Expired cards are roughly 80% recoverable; stolen cards are closer to 10%. Insufficient funds wants a retry after payday, not tomorrow morning.
We retry by decline reason and timing, past the point the default schedule quits, and follow up in your voice rather than a generic receipt.
Incremental only — measured above your current rateWhen recovery fails, the subscription ends. On Substack they're converted to a free subscriber — still on your list, still opening your emails, no longer paying. Elsewhere they simply go quiet.
Nobody works this pile. Not the platform, not Stripe, not the creator. And it's warmer than any normal win-back list, because these people never chose to cancel — a card expired and the system moved on without them.
Clean attribution — they were already goneYour number
Two inputs, and one assumption you can correct with your real figure. No email needed to see the result.
Your numbers
Find your real number: Stripe Dashboard → Billing → Revenue Recovery. The "recovery rate" figure there is exactly this input. Default shown is Stripe's stated average.
Estimated annual impact
Recovered charges plus the remaining lifetime of the subscribers who come back.
The fix
Most tools ask you to connect your billing before you've seen anything. We do it the other way around.
Export your failed charges from the last 90 days and send the file. No connection, no login, no permissions granted. You get three numbers back within 48 hours.
Retry timing set by the reason the card failed, past where the default schedule stops. Then short, personal messages to the lapsed pile — written in your voice, not ours.
Members kept and dollars back in your Stripe, measured against the recovery rate you had before we started. If the line doesn't move, there's nothing to bill.
The deal
Before anything starts, we record what you recover today. That figure becomes the line. We're only paid on revenue that lands above it — never on what Stripe was already getting for you. No monthly fee during the pilot, no setup fee, no contract.
of every dollar recovered above your baseline. Our 25% only exists on money that was already gone and wasn't coming back on its own.
The human
TheyStayed is new, and I'd rather tell you that than fake it. No wall of logos, no cherry-picked testimonials — I'm onboarding the first creators by hand, one at a time.
I'll also tell you the thing most tools in this category leave out: Stripe is already good at this. It recovers roughly 55% of failed payments on its own. If you came here expecting me to claim that number as mine, I can't. What I can do is work the part it misses and the pile of people who lapsed and never came back — and prove it against your own baseline.
What I won't do: spam your members, write to them in a voice that isn't yours, or touch anything in your Stripe you haven't approved. Your list's trust in you is worth more than any recovered payment.
Questions
Free leak audit
Drop your email and I'll reply personally with the two ways to start — a CSV export or View-only access. About 48 hours later you'll have your real numbers, and they're yours to keep either way.
First creators only · pilot pricing locked for life · recover nothing, pay nothing