Subscription billing: the questions we get asked most

The advice here is unglamorous, which is probably why it gets skipped. The questions about subscription billing that come up most often on our calls.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. The teams that stay on top of it are the ones who put it on a calendar rather than a wish list.

Do we need to care about this?

Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

Can it wait until after launch?

Occasionally. More often the post-launch version costs several times the pre-launch one. That sounds obvious written down. It is still the thing most often skipped.

How do we know it is working?

Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The short version

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. 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

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.