A recovery email that changes based on WHY a payment failed — feedback?
I've been building this solo and wanted to get some honest eyes on it before I get too attached to my own assumptions.
The problem I kept running into: when a subscription payment fails, almost every tool sends the same generic "your payment failed, please update your card" email. But the reason it failed is usually very different — an expired or lost card, insufficient funds, or a bank 3-D Secure/SCA verification challenge. Telling someone to "update your card" when their bank just needs them to confirm the charge is not only useless, it makes the whole thing read as impersonal and a bit spammy. Industry-wide, a meaningful chunk of subscription churn is just failed payments that never get recovered, and a lot of that is these avoidable mismatches.
So I built Revova (https://revova.io). It detects failed charges across Stripe (native), plus Paddle, Braintree, Chargebee, and Recurly, and writes a different AI-personalized email depending on the actual decline reason — including a "confirm with your bank" message for SCA challenges instead of asking for a new card. It also adjusts tone based on whether the customer looks B2B or B2C (detected from their email domain). Connecting a processor is read-only — it never moves money or stores card numbers. There's also a free "Lost Revenue Finder" that scans a connected processor read-only and shows how much is already sitting in failed payments, broken down by cause.
Full disclosure: it's early and I'm still learning — I'm a non-technical founder who built this with AI coding tools, so I genuinely want to know where it falls short. Free 14-day trial, no card required. If you want to try it, use code BIRD20 for 25% off — just a courtesy for anyone here, no pressure.
How do you all currently handle failed subscription payments — do you do anything beyond the default dunning emails your processor sends, and what's the part that annoys you most about how that works today?
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