Launch: Modern dunning for modern companies

🚀 TL;DR: We’re launching a modern approach to dunning. Everyone gets their first month free. Every business making less than $25K MRR gets it for free, forever.

Today, we launch another pillar in our revenue-boosting, churn-fighting, retention-popping platform: failed payment recoveries (otherwise known as dunning “in the biz”).

Dunning isn’t a product anybody wants to think about. It’s an unpleasant subject, annoying to set up, and is, in general, an industry that relies on antiquated techniques with decrepit user interfaces.

That's probably because people think it's boring. So boring, in fact, that almost half of the people in our research studies couldn’t remember who they used for recovering failed payments. The other half couldn’t remember the last time they signed into their dashboard.

But dunning is essential to a healthy subscription business. It handles a sensitive topic (“you haven’t paid me what you owe me”) and is highly customer-facing.

Does your business deserve to rely on technology stuck in 2012?

Because dunning is so boring, subscription businesses have entrusted this essential part of their operations to companies from a different era. Every major player in this space originated in the early- to mid-2010s.

They’re built on old technology. Use outdated methods. Have barely changed since they launched.

Business tactics, strategy, philosophies, ways of operating have changed a lot since then.

The 2010s feel like a different era. Years before COVID. Before remote work was a thing. Before Amazon Prime next day shipping, when Bitcoin was under $100, Uber only really had black cars, and you were rocking something like the iPhone 5s (the iPhone 14 is about to be announced, by the way).

Does your business deserve to rely on technology stuck in 2012?

This is back when Instagram had gradients and Disney still had Sequel Trilogy goodwill. When A16z only existed in meatspace (not the cloud), and there were no trillion-dollar companies.

So why haven’t legacy churn products changed? Because they don’t see a need to innovate. They charge exorbitant fees to support massive marketing budgets and sales teams.

It’s time for something new. A dunning product that’s fresh, innovative, and performant. We think there’s a better way forward than relying on the same old technology with the same old, tired, hard-to-use user interfaces.

Here’s what it comes down to: if a healthy subscription business relies on tamping down passive churn, why would you trust last decade’s tech and methods to handle it for you?

This is what modern payment recovery looks like

Today, we’re tripling the size of Churnkey’s product footprint so we can take failed payments off your hands, using modern tools.

What would happen if you had a modern dunning platform — powered by machine learning models and optimized by churn experts — built with a voluntary churn mindset? What insights could you learn and what actions could you take with the latest strategies for maximizing retention?

Well, you’d have Churnkey, of course.

On top of our cutting-edge approach to failed payments, we’re innovating in another sphere: pricing. Since dunning is a requirement for every subscription business, it’s a commodity.

And it should be priced that way.

That’s why every business under $25K MRR gets dunning for free. After that, our fixed pricing model is intentionally set to be 50% of what everyone else is charging.

No percentage takes. No clever ROI math. No abstract, messy “we retained this much revenue over this fuzzy baseline.”

Simply pay a straight, fair price, no matter your monthly revenue, and we’ll perform better than legacy dunning products.

So in addition to personalized cancel flows, Churnkey's payment recovery platform gets you:

• A recovery rate baseline of 50%, with overall success up to 90%
• Incredibly fast setup and on-the-fly editing (no calls, no change requests to submit) — and if you just want us to handle it, you got it
• Hyper-personalization out of the box — one-size-fits-all is so 2012
• Transparent metrics — no hand-waving, numbers padding, or bad statistics
• Modern domain and email sending best practices that boost deliverability and trust
• Campaigns pre-written and customized
• Payment retries and campaign delivery intelligence optimized for you
• Hand-crafted, beautiful payment forms that live on your domain and boost conversions

Get started now

Claim your free account now — you get a month free, no matter what — and you'll have free payment recoveries up to $25K MRR. If you're above $25K MRR, remember that you don't pay a percent of revenue. Flat fees only.

Questions? Read more, chat below, or email us.

Thanks for reading. And thanks to every one of our customers who have supported us over the past 18 months.

Lots more to come 🚀