Ways to recover failed Stripe payments

• Stripe’s own recovery tools

  Smart Retries, failed-payment emails and a recovery dashboard, part of Stripe Billing.

  Dunity vs Stripe

  Costs

  Part of Stripe Billing, 0.7% of Billing volume

  Best when

  Failed payments are rare, or you want no extra tool.

• Churnkey

  A retention platform: cancel flows, payment recovery, text messages and several billing platforms.

  Dunity vs Churnkey

  Costs

  From $250 a month, priced by churn volume

  Best when

  You need cancel flows, text messages, or a billing platform besides Stripe.

• Dunity

  One job: recover failed payments on Stripe, with a payment wall and a win-back discount.

  How Dunity works

  Costs

  $29 a month, flat

  Best when

  Stripe is your billing and failed payments are the whole problem.

Prices from each company’s own pages, checked 30 September 2026. Dunity isn’t affiliated with Stripe or Churnkey.

1. Start with your numbers. Stripe’s revenue recovery overview shows your failure rate and recovery rate, and the calculator turns them into dollars. If failed payments are a small share of your revenue, Stripe’s own tools may be enough.
2. Need more than failed payments? If you want cancel flows, text messages, or a billing platform other than Stripe, look at Churnkey.
3. Billing only through Stripe, and failed payments are the problem? A single-purpose tool such as Dunity covers that for less.
4. Whatever you choose, run one tool at a time for retries and emails. Two tools on one Stripe account mean double retries and double emails.

• Reads the decline reason. Some declines are worth retrying later and some, like a stolen card, are not. Ask how a tool tells them apart. Dunity times retries to the reason and stops retrying once a retry comes back as a hard decline.
• What access it needs. Stripe recommends restricted keys over unrestricted secret keys. Ask for the exact permission list and what each permission is for.
• How it charges. A flat fee stays the same however much a tool recovers. A share of recovered revenue grows with it. Churnkey and Dunity both charge flat fees.
• Who the customer hears from. Some tools send from your own domain and some from theirs. Check the sender, and whether the wording is yours to change.
• Whether you can keep some customers out. A VIP or exclusion list keeps automated messages away from accounts you look after yourself.
• What happens when retries end. A last offer, a cancel flow, or nothing. Dunity can send a win-back discount, and Churnkey can offer discounts or plan changes.

See how Dunity handles each one on how it works, what it needs from Stripe on the setup guide, and the last-offer discount on win-back offers.