Stop losing revenue to failed payments and chargebacks

Your revenue isn’t as secure as you think 

You've won the customer. The payment went through. ARR is booked. But that doesn't mean the revenue is secure.

For most subscription apps, the biggest post-conversion leaks aren't customers choosing to leave – they're involuntary. 

• Failed payments, expired cards, and payment processing errors drive 20–40% of all churn. 
• A further 10% of subscription revenue is lost to failed payments before it's even recovered.

Chargebacks add another layer. They occur when users dispute a payment – often because of forgotten renewals, unclear subscription terms, or billing confusion. At scale, chargebacks don't just cost money in individual disputes: they threaten the entire merchant account, putting global revenue at risk across every product in a portfolio.

These losses compound. Small failure rates, multiplied across regions, payment methods, and products, can cap ARR and LTV long before teams notice the full impact.

What leading apps do differently

The best teams don't treat failed payments as inevitable loss. They treat them as recoverable revenue – and build the infrastructure to prove it.

1. They separate involuntary churn from voluntary churn, tracking them as distinct problems requiring distinct solutions. 
2. They standardize recovery flows globally rather than reinventing them by region. 
3. They reduce disputes through clarity: clear renewal communication, easy access to billing details, and transparent subscription messaging reduce confusion before it becomes a chargeback.
4. They centralize chargeback management with a platform that handles disputes on their behalf, rather than building internal capacity to fight them one by one.

Master English, the language learning app, cut its chargeback rate by 50% in two months simply by improving billing communication.

Paddle takes billing support and chargeback management off your hands. As your Merchant of Record, Paddle handles chargeback disputes directly – removing them from your team's plate entirely. Paddle Retain's smart retry logic automatically recovers failed payments, using algorithms trained on billions of data points to retry at the optimal time based on failure code, card type, location, and timing. Multi-channel recovery sequences – email, in-app notifications, and SMS – reach customers at the right moment with the right message. 

Your fast lane checklist to stop post-conversion revenue leakage

• Separate involuntary churn from voluntary churn – and measure both
• Localize checkout to reduce payment failures at source
• Optimize billing and renewal communication to prevent disputes before they happen
• Treat failed payments as recoverable revenue – not permanent loss
• Implement systematic retry and recovery flows
• Centralize chargeback management
• Track recovered revenue as a core growth metric