Dunning is how a subscription business collects a payment that failed.

It matters because a customer whose card failed has not decided to leave.

When a renewal fails, nothing has told the customer yet. Dunning is the plan for what happens next: when to retry the card, when to write, what the message says, how long the account stays open and when it is cancelled.

A clear plan collects the money without bothering the customer more than needed. No plan means a paying customer is cancelled over an expired card.

A dunning plan has four parts that run in order.

• Retries. The billing system tries the card again on a schedule. Stripe's documentation for its Smart Retries feature gives 8 tries within 2 weeks as the recommended default.
• Messages. Emails, and sometimes notices inside the product, say that the payment failed and link to a page where the customer can update the card.
• Grace period. The account stays open for a set time, so the customer can fix the payment without losing access.
• Final action. If nothing works, the subscription is paused or cancelled, with a last message on how to come back.

Source: Stripe Docs, “Automate payment retries”, read 13 October 2026.

Measure dunning by how much it recovers, and at which step.

dunning recovery rate = payments recovered during dunning ÷ payments that entered dunning × 100
recovery by step = payments recovered at that step ÷ payments that entered dunning × 100
time to recover = days from the first failure to the successful payment

The split by step is what tells you where to work. If retries do most of the recovering, the schedule matters most. If card updates do, the emails and the update page matter most.

You improve dunning by matching each step to the reason the payment failed.

• Retry soft declines and write on hard ones. Missing funds may arrive in a few days. A closed card never will, so skip the retries and ask for a new card.
• Send the first email quickly and keep it short. Say what failed, that the service continues for now, and give one button that opens the card form.
• Spread the retries out. Retries across a week or two give a customer's funds time to arrive.
• Name the end date. Tell the customer the day the account will pause, so the last message is not a surprise.
• Change one thing at a time. Adjust the timing or the wording, then compare recovery by step with the month before.

The first payment after a free trial is where 1Capture works. It authorizes the full amount at signup, so a card that cannot pay never starts a trial, and it retries a failed capture at the end of the trial up to 10 times. The payment recovery rate page covers the number all of this adds up to.

These mistakes make dunning cost you customers.

• Cancelling on the first failure. One declined charge is a billing problem. Ending the account turns it into a lost customer.
• Retrying hard declines. Repeated attempts on a closed card recover nothing and only raise your decline rate.
• Writing like a debt collector. A customer whose card expired has done nothing wrong. Write to them as a customer.
• Never measuring the steps. Without recovery by step, you cannot tell which retry or which email does the work.