Signs it is time to revisit subscription billing

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. A few signals that subscription billing is due some attention.

In e-commerce every friction point has a price attached, and the arithmetic is unusually easy to check. Anything you cannot measure here, you are deciding by taste, which is fine as long as everyone knows it.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source
• Make cancelling easy or you will earn chargebacks instead

Where to start

Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. It is the sort of thing that looks like polish right up until it costs you an enquiry.

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 any of that sounds like a description of your current setup, it is fixable.