What to ask your agency about subscription billing

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on subscription billing, these questions are worth asking early.

Small percentage changes matter here because they apply to every order, every month. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source. Getting it slightly wrong is survivable. Ignoring it entirely is not. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. Where this goes wrong is almost never a lack of knowledge. Assume whoever inherits this will have half your context and none of your patience.

In practice

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Three things worth confirming about subscription billing before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source — 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.