Automatic payment failure retries for all Paddle Billing platform users
When payment fails for automatically-collected subscriptions, Paddle Billing automatically retries the saved payment method — even if you haven't turned on Paddle Retain.
What's new?
We've made automatic payment failure retries available to all Paddle Billing platform users.
Failed payments for automatically-collected subscriptions are now automatically retried up to seven times over 30 days.
How it works
When payment fails for an automatically-collected subscription, the subscription status changes to past due. If customers don't update their payment method, the subscription is automatically canceled after 30 days.
With this update, we automatically retry the saved payment method to try to recover the payment. We use algorithms to retry payments at the best time for success — up to seven times across a 30-day window.
If payment is collected successfully during a retry attempt, the subscription status changes to active and it's no longer overdue.
Automatic payment recovery retries are only available on live accounts. No payment retries occur on sandbox accounts.
Configure retry settings
Automatic payment retries are powered by Paddle Retain. Retain combines world-class subscription expertise with algorithms that use millions of datapoints to help recover failed payments automatically.
For more comprehensive payment recovery and control over the experience, you can turn on Payment Recovery, part of Paddle Retain. As well as automatic payment retries, you get:
- Optimized payment recovery emails, written by experts and tested across thousands of transactions.
- Payment recovery notifications in your web app, reaching users when they're using your app.
- Payment recovery messages by SMS, identifying customers at the right time in a highly personalized way.
- Control over what happens to subscriptions when all payment failure retries are exhausted.
Beyond Payment Recovery, Paddle Retain includes additional tools to help you minimize churn and maximize revenue, including Cancellation Flows and Term Optimization.
Next steps
This change is available now. There are no changes to the Paddle API — it's a change to the way the Paddle platform handles past due subscriptions.
It's a non-breaking change, meaning it doesn't impact existing integrations. For more comprehensive payment recovery and control over the experience, turn on Payment Recovery in Paddle Retain.
If you've already turned on Paddle Retain, there are no changes.
