Resources/Recovery ROI Calculator

What's the ROI of fixing
your failed
payments?

Enter your MRR and processor. See how much is failing, how much is recoverable, and what it costs vs. returns.

Monthly recurring revenue$50k
$1k$250k

Payment processor

9%

Stripe averages ~9% subscription payment failure rate across card networks globally

Failing / month

$5k

$150 walking out today

Recoverable / month

$3k

at up to 60% recovery rate

Recurflux cost

$59

Rise plan / mo

Return on cost

46×

every $1 returns $46

Monthly recoverable by processor

at your $50k MRR

RecoverablePermanently lost

Cost of waiting 30 days

$5k

$150 in failed payments walks out every day you delay.

Recurflux pays for itself

Day 1

of month 1 — before your second invoice arrives.

Failure rates are industry benchmarks per processor. Connect your account to see your actual number.Rise plan — $59/mo flat. No percentage of recovered revenue.

Stop the bleeding →

Connects to Stripe in under 5 minutes. Starts recovering the same day.

How it's calculated

The formula behind the ROI.

Monthly MRR at risk = MRR × payment failure rate. At $100K MRR and 7% failure rate, $7,000 is at risk each month.

Currently recovered = MRR at risk × current recovery rate. If you rely on Stripe Smart Retries (≈30%), you're already recovering $2,100 of that $7,000.

Recoverable gain = MRR at risk × (target recovery rate − current rate). Moving from 30% to 65% recovery on $7,000 at risk means an additional $2,450/month captured.

Net monthly ROI = recoverable gain − tool cost. At $2,450/month gained and a $59/month tool, net ROI is $2,391 per month. Payback happens in the first week.

Payment recovery ROI, explained

What is payment recovery ROI?

Payment recovery ROI is the return you get from recapturing failed subscription charges, measured against what a recovery system costs to run. Every month, a slice of your MRR fails to bill — expired cards, insufficient funds, bank declines — and most of that slice is recoverable with the right retry timing and dunning sequence. ROI is simply: (recovered revenue − tool cost) ÷ tool cost. Because the cost is fixed and small relative to MRR, the ROI on payment recovery tooling is consistently one of the highest of any line item in a SaaS budget.

How recovery rate changes the math

Recovery rate is the single biggest lever in this calculator — more than MRR, more than failure rate. A business at $50,000 MRR with a 7% failure rate has roughly $3,500 at risk every month. At a 30% recovery rate (typical for default processor retries alone), $1,050 comes back and $2,450 is gone for good. At a 65% recovery rate, $2,275 comes back — more than double — and the gap between "gone for good" and "recovered" shrinks to $1,225. The MRR and failure rate are mostly outside your control month to month. Recovery rate is the one number you can move on purpose.

What's a good recovery rate to target?

Relying on a processor's built-in smart retries alone typically recovers 20–30% of failed payments. Adding a basic dunning email sequence on top usually brings that to 40–50%. A combined system — adaptive retry timing matched to the decline reason, multi-step dunning, and proactive card-update flows — typically lands in the 60–70% range, which is the band most Recurflux customers operate in. If you don't know your current recovery rate, 30% (default smart retries only) is a reasonable starting assumption to plug into this calculator.

3 ways to raise your recovery rate

  1. Match retry timing to the decline reason. A blanket "retry in 3 days" schedule wastes attempts on cards that will never clear and misses the window on ones that would. Insufficient-funds declines recover best around payday cycles; expired cards need a card-update prompt, not a retry.
  2. Run a multi-step dunning sequence, not a single email. One reminder email recovers a fraction of what a 4–6 email sequence recovers, spaced across the retry window with escalating urgency and a working payment-update link in each one.
  3. Catch expiring cards before they fail. A meaningful share of "failed payments" are predictable — the card on file expires at month-end. Prompting for an update two to four weeks ahead converts a guaranteed failure into a non-event.

Common questions

How do I stop my SaaS from losing MRR to failed payments?

On average, 1–3% of MRR is lost to failed payments every month — without a single customer choosing to leave. The fix is a three-part system: retry timing matched to the exact decline code, a dunning email sequence starting within 24 hours of failure, and proactive card expiry alerts 30+ days before renewal. Together, these move recovery from the typical 20–30% (default processor retries) to 60–70%.

How can I increase SaaS revenue without acquiring new customers?

Improving payment recovery is the highest-ROI lever available. A $100k MRR business recovering 65% of failed payments instead of 30% captures an additional $2,000–$2,500 per month — no new marketing, no product changes. Combined with reducing voluntary churn and adding expansion revenue, payment recovery is the fastest path to MRR growth from existing customers.

How do I improve my payment recovery rate?

Three levers move recovery rate the most: (1) match retry timing to the specific decline reason — insufficient funds retries align with payday cycles, not arbitrary 3-day windows; (2) run a 4–6 step dunning email sequence, not a single notification; (3) catch expiring cards 30+ days before they fail with proactive alerts. Moving from processor defaults to this combined approach typically increases recovery from 25–30% to 60–70%.

What is the ROI of a payment recovery tool?

Payment recovery tools typically return $10–$20 for every $1 spent. For most SaaS businesses, the cost is offset within the first month of recovered revenue.

How do I calculate how much MRR I am losing to payment failures?

Multiply your MRR by your payment failure rate (typically 5–8%) to get monthly revenue at risk. Multiply that by the gap between your target recovery rate and current rate to get the revenue you are leaving on the table. A $200k MRR business at 7% failure rate with 30% recovery has $9,800 at risk and $6,860 unrecovered each month.

That projection is a model. The audit shows the real number.

Connect your processor free. Recurflux scans your actual failed payments from the last 90 days and shows what's recoverable — against the estimate you just ran. Founder plan from $20/month.

Audit my actual recovery →