Before you invest in subscription billing

This is one of those topics that looks small until it costs you something. Before you spend anything on subscription billing, it is worth confirming a few things are already true.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

Prerequisites

• You can describe the outcome you want in one sentence
• Someone owns it after the work is done
• Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source
• You have a way to tell whether it worked

Warning signs

Make cancelling easy or you will earn chargebacks instead. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. The reasoning matters more than the rule, because the rule has exceptions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

In practice

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. Three things worth confirming about subscription billing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.