Why failed payments matter more than they look
A failed payment is involuntary churn: the customer did not decide to leave. Their card expired, was replaced after a fraud alert, hit a limit, or was declined by the bank. If nobody tells them, the subscription eventually ends anyway. For a small SaaS company these are the easiest customers to keep, because they already want the product. They just need to know there is a problem and have a quick way to fix it.
Stripe retries failed card payments automatically, but a retry on the same expired or blocked card often fails again. What usually recovers the payment is the customer updating their card, and that only happens when someone asks them to.
What Lokuna does when a payment fails
Lokuna listens to your Stripe account, so a failed invoice starts the recovery sequence as soon as Stripe reports it, not on the next daily batch. The default sequence:
| When | Channel | Message |
|---|---|---|
| Right away | A calm note that the latest payment didn't go through, with a button to update the payment method. | |
| Day 3 | A short follow-up: the payment still hasn't gone through, and why it matters (no interruption to their account). | |
| Day 5 | Text message | A brief text with the same payment link, if you connected an SMS provider and the customer's timezone is known. |
| Day 7 | A final, friendly note that the account may be interrupted soon, with an offer to help if something is wrong on their side. |
Every message links to the customer's real Stripe invoice page, so they pay or update their card on Stripe, not on a form Lokuna built. The sequence stops as soon as the invoice is paid, the customer replies, or the subscription ends. When the customer replies, the agents read it and write the answer for you to send in one click.
Before the card fails: expiring card warnings
The cheapest failed payment to recover is the one that never happens. When the card on file expires within the next 14 days and the customer is otherwise in good standing, Lokuna sends one short heads-up with a link to update it. That is all: no repeated reminders.
Written for the customer, sent from you
Each message is written for that customer, in your brand voice, and sent through your own email provider (Resend, SendGrid, Amazon SES or Postmark) from your domain. Payment notices are transactional, so they can follow another message after 48 hours instead of the usual 72, but they still count toward the same per-customer limits as everything else Lokuna sends. Payment messages never offer a discount. A customer whose card bounced hasn't asked for a better price, and offering one trains people to let payments fail.
When a recovery counts as a save
Lokuna only claims a recovery it caused. A failed payment counts as saved when the invoice is paid after the customer added a new card following Lokuna's payment email, or paid within 24 hours of using Lokuna's payment link. Links opened within two minutes of delivery are treated as email security scanners, not people. Every save is listed in your dashboard with its evidence. On the Growth plan, each one is billed once, at 20% of the invoice the customer actually paid; see the pricing rules for worked examples.
Part of Lokuna's retention agents
Failed payment recovery is one of the agents' plays. The same contact limits and approval rules cover scheduled cancellations, downgrades, win-back and the hosted cancel page, so each customer has one conversation at a time and the same limits apply across all of them. How Lokuna works explains the whole system.
