[xyzzy_plugh]

One thing that I never see brought up in these kinds of discussions is that payment of subscription fees is almost orthagonal to the subscription itself. Stripe eventually gives up, which seems like a fair default, but Stripe is also ignorant as to the legal agreements customers and merchants have made.

There's a whole industry around managing subscription-related debts and debt collecting that folks often forget about.

That is to say that there are alternatives to cancelling after a few failed payments, other than trying other cards in the customer's wallet. They may be worth exploring.

[peekypeeky008]

Our goal as a product is never to reach the stage of subscription cancellation, and definitely not debt collection. We’re saving failed payments from being canceled.

Our merchants have thousands of customers. This is not a debt collection use case. It is about saving good payments that should go through. It is about fighting broken bank models with our models for payment recovery

[xyzzy_plugh]

I disagree that the bank models are broken. At face value, a more effective method is to pay the fee to the issue to get the updated card, if it exists. Nearly every issuer supports this nowadays. If you've ever wondered why your subscription magically updated to your new card after your old one expired, then this is precisely what they did. It's easy to do this with Stripe as well.

If customers care deeply about their subscription and you support adding multiple cards to ensure payments don't fail, then great. I'm not sure this makes sense as a product, though. It's very easy to implement this sort of dunning, roll over to next card, rinse-repeat strategy. The TCO of an additional vendor in this critical path is unlikely to be worth it, especially with the direction the merchant-of-record-as-a-service industry is headed.

In any case, one path I was insinuating is that these failure cases are good opportunities for customer engagement. Often times it can be as simple as the card-holding manager left a the company and no one realizes the sub is on their account. Depending on your response, this sort of event can make a huge difference to your funnel/lifecycle.

I wish you luck but I just don't think the market is there.

If, however, you also have an off-ramp to debt collecting then I think this is a viable product when targeting certain markets.