Stripe already gives you automatic retries and customer emails for failed payments, and for many accounts that is the right place to start. Retivo does not replace them. A Retivo Revenue Leak Report reads your Stripe history and tells you in dollars how much those settings are leaving behind, so you know whether more tooling is worth paying for. I founded Retivo, so weigh that.
What does Stripe do for failed payments out of the box?
Everything in this section comes from Stripe's documentation pages on automating retries and customer emails, read on 9 November 2026.
- Smart Retries. Stripe says it uses AI to pick the times to retry a failed payment, using signals such as how many devices have presented a payment method and the time of day a payment is most likely to succeed. For new Stripe accounts it is on by default and set up to 8 retries within 2 weeks. You can choose a window from 1 week to 2 months.
- Custom schedule. You can turn Smart Retries off and set up to three retries, each a number of days after the previous one.
- What happens at the end. You choose whether the subscription is cancelled, marked unpaid, left past due or paused after retries run out.
- Customer emails. You can switch on emails for failed payments, expiring cards (sent one month before expiry), trial ending reminders and renewal reminders. They use your branding and link to a page where the customer can update the payment method, either Stripe-hosted or your own.
How do Retivo and Stripe's tools compare?
| Row | Retivo | Stripe retries and emails |
|---|---|---|
| Who it is for | Stripe businesses with roughly 2,000 or more paying customers who want to know the size of each leak | Any Stripe Billing account |
| What it does | Measures four leaks in dollars per month; a pilot then tests fixes against a holdout | Retries payments, sends notification emails, links to a card update page |
| How it is set up | A restricted read-only key; nothing in your account is changed | Settings in your Dashboard under Billing, Revenue recovery |
| What you own | The report; in a pilot, messages go out from your brand and domain | It all lives in your Stripe account and uses your branding settings |
| Integrations | Stripe | Built into Stripe Billing |
| Where it is weaker | Costs money; the report is a read of history, not a fix | Per its docs, hard declines such as a lost or stolen card are not retried until there is a new payment method; whether the emails recover as much as a tailored sequence is not something its docs say |
When are Stripe's own tools enough?
When you have not yet turned them on, or have never read what they are set to. That is the cheapest improvement available and it costs nothing. I walk through the order in how to recover failed payments on Stripe subscriptions.
They can also be enough when your failed-payment loss is small. If the leak is a few hundred dollars a month, a paid service will not pay for itself.
When is it worth adding Retivo?
- Your settings are already on and you still see invoices ending lost. The report counts them, with the decline mix, and shows what is left after Stripe's retries.
- You suspect the problem is not only payments. Trials that never convert, cancellations with no save attempt and downgrades are outside what Stripe's retry and email settings address.
- You want a result you can prove. A pilot compares customers who got the fixes with a 20% holdout that got nothing from me. See what a holdout group is.
Does Retivo replace Smart Retries?
No. I read your data from a restricted read-only key, and the report changes nothing in your account. Smart Retries is a Stripe setting that keeps doing its job.
Why do hard declines matter?
Stripe's docs list decline codes it will not retry without a new payment method, such as lost_card, stolen_card and incorrect_number. For those, only the customer can fix it, which is why the message to them matters. I explain how to read your own codes in how to read Stripe decline codes.
Is the Stripe email enough to get the card updated?
Stripe says its email gives the customer a way to update the payment method so the payment can be retried. Whether it is enough for your customers is an empirical question, and the answer is in your own recovered-versus-lost numbers. That is the first thing the report measures. See how to calculate a failed-payment recovery rate.
Where does this information come from?
Stripe documentation: automate payment retries and automate customer emails, read on 9 November 2026. Stripe changes its defaults, so check your own Dashboard for what your account is set to. Retivo: retivo.digital and the articles on this blog.
Want your own numbers?
The Revenue Leak Report puts failed payments, unconverted trials, cancellations and downgrades in dollars per month, read from a restricted read-only Stripe key. $490, delivered within 48 hours of receiving the key. Nothing in your account is changed.
Get the Revenue Leak Report - $490 See a sample (synthetic data)