Flat Fee Dunning

Flat Fee Dunning

Flat fee dunning is failed-payment recovery priced as one fixed monthly fee instead of a percentage of the revenue recovered. The recovery work itself is the same work either way — decline-code-aware retries, branded dunning emails, a hosted card-update page, cancel deflection — but the bill never grows with your recovered revenue, your subscriber count, or your worst month. You pay the same in the month recovery saves you $400 as in the month it saves you $40,000.

Most of the dunning category prices the other way: a percentage of every dollar recovered, sometimes on top of a platform fee. That pricing feels safe in month one and gets expensive exactly when the tool works. Flat fee pricing exists because recovery is a utility, like the billing platform itself — it should cost a known number, and the number should be small next to what a single saved subscriber is worth over a year.

How flat fee dunning works

The pricing model changes nothing about the mechanics. A complete flat fee dunning setup runs:

• Decline-code-aware retries. Every failure comes back with a reason. Insufficient funds gets a schedule timed to paydays (a ladder that can run to about day 25); an expired card goes straight to the customer instead of being retried blindly; hard declines stop immediately. The ceiling is eight attempts per failed payment — on Stripe, our retries weave into Stripe's native schedule under a combined cap of 15 attempts.
• Branded dunning email and SMS. Messages on days 1, 3 and 7 in your store's name and voice, each with one job and one link.
• A hosted card-update page that carries your branding, so a subscriber who doesn't recognize the sender never has to wonder who is asking for their card.
• Cancel deflection. One branded save offer at the moment a subscriber moves to cancel — a pause, a skip, a discount — with the exit one click away.
• A 90-day backfill. On connect, the last 90 days of failed payments are pulled in and worked through the same sequences, not written off.

Flat fee vs revenue share

Revenue-share pricing takes a cut of recovered revenue — commonly a tenth or more of everything that comes back — so the tool's fee scales with your failure volume and your prices. Flat fee pricing takes neither into account. The crossover point is simple arithmetic: at a 10% share, a $179 flat fee is the cheaper option the moment you recover more than $1,790 in a month; at a 15% share, the moment you recover more than about $1,193. Below those lines, revenue share is genuinely cheaper, and we say so. The full worked table — at $5k, $15k, $50k and $150k of monthly failed payments — is on our flat-fee dunning comparison page.

What it costs here

Swipe Again is flat fee dunning at $179/month: every platform, every feature above, no percentage of recovered revenue, no tiers tied to your MRR. Not sure your failed payments clear the crossover? Run your own numbers through the failed payment calculator first — no email, no signup.

Recover $179 in 30 days, guaranteed — or Swipe Again is free the next 30 days.

Who flat fee dunning fits — and who it doesn't

It fits subscription businesses whose failed payments run into four figures a month: at that volume a percentage fee is a tax on the recovery working. It fits merchants on more than one platform, who would otherwise pay per-platform recovery pricing. It does not fit a store whose failed payments total a few hundred dollars a month — your billing platform's native retries are probably enough, and an honest calculator will tell you that before any sales conversation does.

What flat fee dunning payment recovery costs

Option	Cost
Your billing platform’s native recovery	Included in your platform bill
Swipe Again	$179/mo flat — no percentage of recovered revenue
Revenue-share recovery tools	Typically 5–15% of whatever they recover

Prices checked October 2026. The full pricing-model comparison is on the flat-fee dunning comparison page.

Doing it yourself: the honest comparison

The real alternative to any dunning tool is a person with a spreadsheet: exporting failures weekly, emailing subscribers by hand, retrying cards one by one. At a handful of failures a month that works, and it is free. It breaks on three things. Timing: a manual pass happens when someone has time, not on payday — and insufficient-funds recovery is mostly timing. Persistence: the eighth attempt, three weeks later, is where a meaningful share of recoveries live, and manual processes quietly stop at two. Measurement: without attribution you never learn which messages and timings work, so month six looks exactly like month one. Flat fee dunning is priced for the moment the manual process starts costing more in lost renewals than $179 — for most subscription stores that moment arrives somewhere between $3,000 and $5,000 of monthly failed payments, well before a percentage-priced tool becomes the cheaper option at scale.

Frequently asked questions

What is flat fee dunning?
Failed-payment recovery — retries, dunning messages, card updates, cancel deflection — priced as one fixed monthly fee instead of a percentage of the revenue recovered.

Is flat fee dunning cheaper than revenue share?
Above a crossover, yes; below it, no. At a 10% revenue share the crossover is $1,790 recovered per month against a $179 fee. The comparison page works the math at several volumes.

Does the fee change as my business grows?
No. The fee is $179/month regardless of MRR, subscriber count, or how much is recovered in a month.

What platforms does it run on?
Stripe, Recharge, Chargebee, Recurly, Paddle, Seal Subscriptions, Skio and Braintree, with dunning-only coverage on Loop and a WooCommerce plugin.

What happens in a month where recovery is small?
The fee stays $179 — and the guarantee stands behind it: recover $179 in 30 days, guaranteed — or Swipe Again is free the next 30 days.

Updated November 2026.

How flat fee dunning works, step by step

Step 1 — connect. You connect the billing platform you already use. Nothing about your checkout, your pricing or your subscribers' experience changes; the recovery layer sits behind the platform and reads the payments that fail.

Step 2 — the backfill. The last 90 days of failed payments are imported on connect. For most stores this is where the first recovered dollars come from: failures from before signup that native retries already gave up on, worked again under a fuller schedule.

Step 3 — decline-aware retries. Each failed payment is scheduled by its decline code, up to 8 attempts. Insufficient-funds failures are timed along a payday ladder out to about day 25. Expired cards route to a card-update ask rather than burning attempts. Hard declines stop the sequence the moment they appear. On Stripe, the attempts weave into Stripe's own retry schedule under a combined cap of 15, so the two systems never collide on the same day.

Step 4 — branded contact. The subscriber hears from your brand: emails on days 1, 3 and 7 after the failure, up to 3 text messages where a mobile number is on file, and a hosted card-update page that takes under a minute to complete. If the subscriber heads for the cancel button instead, they meet one save offer first.

Step 5 — measurement. Every recovered payment is stamped with what recovered it — a retry, a card update or a save offer — and reported in dollars. Against a flat fee, that report is the whole contract: recovered dollars on one side, $179 on the other.

A worked month, with the fee arithmetic shown

Illustration, using the published recovery bands (native tooling roughly 25–40% of failed payments; a dedicated layer roughly 45–60%): a store with $4,500 of failed payments in a month recovers about $2,025–$2,700 with a dedicated layer. Under a 10%-of-recovery price, that month costs $203–$270 — and the fee grows every time recovery improves. Under flat fee dunning it costs $179, the same as the slow month before it and the record month after it. The crossover is the whole argument: a percentage fee is cheaper only while recovery is small, which is another way of saying it is cheaper only while it is not working very well. The full side-by-side, including where revenue share genuinely wins, is on the flat-fee dunning comparison page.

What flat fee dunning does not change

The fee shape does not fix a weak schedule, thin contact channels or sloppy attribution — a flat-priced tool with a three-attempt fixed schedule is still a three-attempt fixed schedule. Judge any flat fee offer, including this one, on the working parts first: attempts per failure, decline handling, channels, backfill, and per-payment attribution. The pricing model decides what success costs you; the mechanics decide whether there is any success to pay for.

Related: Flat-Fee Alternative to Revenue-Share Dunning Tools covers the neighbouring case in full.

Related: Flat-Fee Payment Recovery: $179/mo, No Revenue Share covers the neighbouring case in full.

The companion guide is Failed Payment Recovery for Skio.

The companion guide is Failed Payment Recovery for Loop Subscriptions.

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