Subscription billing for small teams

There is no clever trick in this one, just a handful of decisions worth making deliberately. Most advice about subscription billing assumes a team that does not exist at your size. Here is the version that does not.

Trust does most of the selling online, and trust is built from unglamorous details. It rarely shows up as a line item, which is exactly why it slips.

What to keep

Failed card payments are the largest silent churn source. The teams that handle this well are rarely the ones with the biggest budgets. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

What to drop

Process that exists to coordinate ten people is overhead when there are two of you. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding.

How we handle it

Dunning emails recover a meaningful share of failures. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. 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

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