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How much is involuntary churn actually costing you?

Involuntary churn is the revenue you lose when a card expires or a bank declines a charge — nobody cancelled, the money just stops arriving. This calculator turns your own numbers into a yearly figure, then tells you whether a $29/mo dunning tool is worth it or whether Stripe's free retries are already enough.

No account, no Stripe key, nothing leaves your browser. The arithmetic runs on this page.

$

Stripe → Billing → Overview. A round number is fine.

$

Per customer, per month. Only used to turn dollars back into invoices.

%

Don't guess if you can count: failed invoices ÷ all invoices over the last 90 days.

%

Of the failed amount, how much comes back on its own — mostly Stripe retrying the card quietly. Your dashboard knows.

%

Retries plus emails plus a card-update link. Use a number you'd bet on, not a number from someone's brochure.

Charges that fail each month
$200
≈ 6.7 invoices a month
Never recovered — per month
$140
Never recovered — per year
$1,680
What a sequence adds on top of what you already get
$30
This is the number that decides. Not total recovered — the extra.
So, is it worth it?
It pays for itself, barely: about $1 a month net, back in the black on day 29. Worth $29 if you'd rather not write dunning emails by hand. Not worth reorganising your week around.

Where to find your real numbers in Stripe

Three of the five fields above are guesses until you look. Ten minutes in your own dashboard beats any industry average someone put in a blog post.

  1. Failure rate: Billing → Invoices, filtered on the last 90 days. Divide the invoices that failed at least once by the total. Whatever you read elsewhere, yours is yours.
  2. What you already recover: of those failed invoices, count how many ended up Paid anyway. That's your baseline, and it's mostly Stripe retrying the card without telling you.
  3. Average subscription price: MRR ÷ active subscriptions. If you have three plans, use the one most people are actually on, not the average of the price tags.

Stripe's own documentation explains how Smart Retries choose retry times. They're on by default for most accounts — which is exactly why your baseline is rarely zero.

Why we'd rather you didn't buy

For a lot of small SaaS the honest answer is: leave Stripe Smart Retries on and go back to shipping. Dunning tools are priced for companies with a pile of failed invoices, which is why the standard advice is to not buy one until you're big. At $29 that line sits lower — but it still exists, and the box above draws it from your inputs, not from ours. If it says no, it says no. We'd rather lose the sale than charge you $29 a month to recover $12.

If the number says yes, the next question is what actually runs: the four steps to reduce involuntary churn, and how SaveMyMRR runs them for you — including a real card retry through Stripe, not just a reminder email.

Questions people actually ask

What counts as involuntary churn?

A customer who still wants your product but stops paying because the payment failed — expired card, insufficient funds, a bank declining a routine renewal. Nobody clicked cancel. It shows up in your MRR as churn and in your inbox as nothing at all.

Isn't Stripe Smart Retries enough?

Often, yes. Smart Retries re-attempt the card on a schedule Stripe picks, for free, and they already run on your account. What they can't do is the part that needs a voice: telling the customer their card died and handing them a link to fix it. The gap between those two outcomes is the entire business case — that's the "today" and "with a sequence" fields above.

Do I need to connect Stripe to use this calculator?

No. Five inputs and some arithmetic, running in your browser. Nothing is sent anywhere and there's no account to create. Connecting Stripe is only useful once you want the same figures pulled from your real invoices instead of typed in by hand.

Want these numbers from your real invoices instead?

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Free plan · no credit card · the key stays revocable from your Stripe dashboard