Cover image for Recoupt: the involuntary churn tool I wish I’d had when I was running a SaaS

Recoupt: the involuntary churn tool I wish I’d had when I was running a SaaS

Recoupt Team
7 min read

By Greg, founder of Recoupt

If you run a small SaaS on Stripe, here's a number that should bother you more than it does: somewhere between 5% and 15% of your monthly revenue silently disappears because a customer's card expires, their bank declines a renewal, or their issuer flags the charge as suspicious. The customer didn't quit. They didn't email support. They didn't even notice. Stripe just stopped getting paid, and a few weeks later, the subscription cancels itself.

That's involuntary churn. And if you're under, say, $50K MRR, you're almost certainly not doing anything systematic about it — because every tool that exists to fix it was built for companies twenty times your size.

That's the gap Recoupt (recoupt.io) was built for.

Why I built this

A bit of background: I spent 17 years as the CTO of a MedTech B2B SaaS company. I lived inside our billing system. I watched failed payments roll in every month and got very familiar with the menu of options: write custom retry logic, hire a billing ops person, or buy a churn-prevention platform that started at $500–$2,000 a month and took percentages of recovered revenue on top.

For a Fortune-500-owned company, fine. For the indie founder I am today, and the customers I'm building Recoupt for? Completely upside down. The economics of "we take 25% of what we recover" only make sense if you've already accepted that you can't do this yourself. But the actual mechanics — smart retry timing, customer notifications, dunning emails that don't sound like a collections agency — are not rocket science. They're just tedious, and nobody packages them for small founders at a price that respects how thin small-founder margins are.

So Recoupt is the flat-priced, opinionated, Stripe-native involuntary churn recovery tool I'd want to plug into a side project the morning it started taking real money.

What it actually does

Recoupt sits on top of your Stripe account (read-only where it can be, write-scoped only where it has to be) and handles the full lifecycle of a failed payment. Concretely:

Smart retries. Stripe's default Smart Retries are fine, but they're a black box and they're aggressive in ways that aren't always right for your customer base. Recoupt lets you tune retry windows by failure code — insufficient_funds should retry in 3–5 days, not 24 hours; expired_card shouldn't retry at all until the customer updates their card; do_not_honor deserves its own playbook. We've baked in defaults that reflect what actually works on small B2B SaaS, and you can override per-product or per-plan.

Dunning that sounds like a human. Failed-payment emails are the single highest-leverage place to apply your brand voice, and the single most common place founders ghost their customers because the default templates are robotic. Recoupt ships with templates that read like a polite founder note ("Hey — looks like your card just expired, no rush, here's the link to update it"), customizable in plain text, with merge tags for the customer's name, the failure reason, and the next retry date. No HTML email builder. No campaign editor. Just three messages, written well.

A customer-facing card update page that doesn't look like 2014. Most failed payments resolve themselves the moment the customer actually sees the request — but only if the link they click goes somewhere that looks legitimate. Recoupt hosts a branded update page on your subdomain (recoupt.yourdomain.com) with your logo, your colors, and Stripe Elements doing the actual work. No login, no friction, just "update card → done."

A dashboard that tells you the truth. How much MRR did you almost lose this month? How much did Recoupt recover? Which retry attempt actually worked? Which customers are still in the funnel? One page. No 12-widget BI overlay. The number that matters is "dollars recovered," and that's the number at the top.

What it deliberately doesn't do

I want to be specific about this because it's the part that distinguishes Recoupt from the enterprise tools, and it's also the part that some people will read as a missing feature:

  • No percentage take. Flat monthly price, tied to your MRR band. You keep 100% of what Recoupt recovers. If we recover an extra $400 in a month for a $19/mo customer, that's $381 of pure margin back in your business.
  • No "AI" anywhere it doesn't earn its keep. Retry timing benefits from a small amount of pattern-matching. Email subject lines do not need a 70-billion-parameter model. We use ML where it measurably improves recovery rate and stop there.
  • No CRM, no analytics suite, no marketing automation. Recoupt does one thing. If you want a 360° customer view, buy a different tool. We're trying to solve a specific leak, not be your everything-app.
  • No deep multi-processor support yet. Stripe-only at launch. If you're on Paddle or Chargebee, we're not for you yet. (Paddle is on the roadmap; tell me if that matters to you and it moves up.)

That's a deliberately narrow product. It exists because the broad ones already exist, and they're not serving small founders.

Who Recoupt is for

If you nod along to most of these, you're the target customer:

  • You're on Stripe.
  • Your MRR is somewhere between "first paying customers" and "I just hired my second person."
  • You have a subscription business — could be B2B SaaS, a paid newsletter, a creator membership, a course platform — anything where Stripe retries cards monthly.
  • You've squinted at your Stripe failed-charges report at least once this quarter and thought "I should really do something about this" and then closed the tab.
  • The idea of paying a percentage of recovered revenue, to a vendor, on top of Stripe's 2.9% + 30¢, makes you twitch.

If you're north of a few hundred K in MRR and you have a billing ops function, you probably want Churnkey or Stunning or Baremetrics Recover. Those are good tools. They're just not for the stage I'm building for.

Where it is right now

Recoupt is live at recoupt.io. Stripe Connect is in, the retry engine is running on real accounts, the dunning emails go out, and the dashboard works. I'm onboarding early users one-on-one right now because I want to watch how the first ten customers actually use it before I open the gates wider. If you're a Stripe-based founder and any of the above resonated, the early-access form is on the site, and I read every submission personally.

A note on the rename: this product was briefly known as ChurnGuard, on a subdomain. Recoupt is the same product, properly named, on its own domain. Same focus, same flat pricing, same opinionated narrow scope.

Why I'm posting this on PeerPush

PeerPush's whole point is that small builders need discovery channels that aren't designed for enterprise launches with PR budgets. That's exactly the audience I built Recoupt for — and exactly the audience most likely to look at their Stripe dashboard tonight and find a few hundred dollars of recoverable revenue they didn't know was on the table.

If that's you: go check. Either way, I'd love feedback — what would make a tool like this an obvious yes for you?

— Greg