How much MRR are you losing to failed payments?
A simple back-of-envelope way to estimate the revenue leaking out of your Stripe account through failed payments — and what a 10% recovery improvement is worth.
You can't prioritise dunning until you can size it. Here's a quick way to estimate your failed-payment leak without a data project.
The basic formula
Failed-payment MRR at risk per month ≈ (monthly failed charges) × (share never recovered) × (average subscription value).
- Monthly failed charges: in Stripe, count invoices that hit payment_failed in the last 30 days.
- Share never recovered: of those, how many never reached paid? That's your leak rate.
- Average subscription value: total MRR ÷ active subscriptions.
A worked example
Say you process 1,000 subscriptions at an average of USD 40/mo. Industry card-failure rates for subscriptions commonly land around 5–10% of charges per month. Take 7%: that's ~70 failed charges. If half are never recovered, that's 35 lost subscriptions × USD 40 = USD 1,400 of MRR at risk every month.
A 10-point improvement in recovery rate on that example is ~USD 280/month recovered — and it keeps recurring.
Why the number is usually worse than you think
- Failed charges cluster at month boundaries, so a broken recovery path leaks in bursts.
- Annual plans that fail are large single hits that are easy to miss.
- Leaks persist for months because nothing alerts you when recovery breaks.
Turn the estimate into a baseline
The estimate tells you whether dunning is worth your time (it almost always is). To get a real baseline, track recovered vs failed invoices over one month. Or run a free recovery-path audit to see the specific gaps that are costing you the recoverable portion today.
Subscribe for monthly monitoring. Your first audit is generated today.
Your first audit shows exactly where recovery is leaking today. Monthly monitoring then catches the next break before it costs you another month of MRR.