Expiring cards: the failure you can see coming

Why expired cards deserve their own email

expired_card is a hard decline: retrying the same card cannot work, and Stripe waits for a new payment method before charging again (Stripe decline codes). Once the renewal has failed, you are already in dunning. A week earlier, it is a one-line heads-up.

What Stripe already does

• Card account updater. For many Visa and Mastercard cards (and some others, depending on the country), networks pass the new expiry or number to Stripe automatically. Those renewals simply go through.
• Expiring card emails. Stripe Billing can email customers about an expiring card from its own settings, with Stripe's wording and links.

What neither tells you: which customers, how much MRR, and when.

Find them in your account

1. List live subscriptions (active and trialing) that renew within the next 45 days and are charged automatically.
2. For each customer, read the card of their last successful charge: payment_method_details.card.exp_month and exp_year.
3. A card is valid until the last day of its expiry month. If that day comes before the renewal, flag it.
4. Skip subscriptions set to cancel at period end: nothing will be charged.

The free scan does exactly this with read-only permissions, next to what is already stuck, and shows the MRR at risk.

The email to send

About a week before the renewal, once. Name the card (brand and last four digits), the renewal date and amount, and give one button to your billing page. Say clearly that nothing is charged by the email. No urgency words: the customer has done nothing wrong.

SaveMyMRR Pro sends it automatically under your product's name, once per renewal, and replies land in your inbox.