Flat-Fee Alternative to Revenue-Share Dunning Tools

Most dedicated dunning tools charge a percentage of the revenue they recover — commonly in the 10–15% range, sometimes more. Swipe Again charges $179 a month, flat, whether we recover $500 or $50,000. This page works the comparison with real numbers, including the range where revenue share is genuinely the cheaper choice, because a flat-fee alternative only deserves your business if the math survives honesty.

The worked math

Take a subscription business recovering $5,000 a month in failed payments. At a 12.5% revenue share, that recovery costs $625 a month — $7,500 a year — paid to the tool for saving customers the business already paid to acquire. At $179 flat, the same recovery costs $179. The gap is $446 a month, and it widens with every recovered dollar, because the percentage scales with your success and the flat fee does not. Scale the example: at $15,000 recovered monthly, revenue share at 12.5% is $1,875 a month against the same $179. The failed payment calculator runs your own recovery volume through both pricing shapes.

Where revenue share is honestly cheaper

The crossover is simple division: at a 12.5% share, revenue-share pricing costs less than $179 only while monthly recovered revenue stays under roughly $1,400. Below that line — a very small subscriber base, or a business just starting to work its failed payments — the percentage is the cheaper ticket, and we will say so. Two catches ride along. First, the percentage is charged on recovery from day one of growth, so the pricing punishes exactly the trajectory you are buying the tool to create. Second, percentage pricing quietly taxes your best months: a seasonal spike in recoveries becomes a spike in fees, while the flat fee stays boring. Our flat-fee payment recovery page lays out the shape in full.

The incentive question

Pricing shapes behavior on both sides. A revenue-share tool earns more when more of your payments fail and get recovered — its revenue is indexed to your leakage. A flat-fee tool earns the same whether your failure rate falls or not, which is why we can afford to help you reduce failures upstream (card-update prompts before expiry, payday-timed first attempts) even though every prevented failure is a recovery we never get to count. Neither model makes a vendor dishonest; only one of them makes your success cheaper over time. Platform-native recovery deserves a mention here too: Stripe's and Recharge's built-in tools are bundled rather than percentage-priced, but they cover one platform each and stop at the payment — the wider comparison is on our payment recovery software page.

What flat buys you, in one list

• Predictability: $179 on the pricing page, the same at 100 subscribers and at 10,000.
• Both halves included: failed-payment recovery and cancel deflection — no second tool, no second percentage.
• Nine platforms, one fee: Stripe, Recharge, Chargebee, Recurly, Paddle, Seal, Skio, Braintree, and Shopify under a single subscription.
• A guarantee with a number in it: stated below, once, and kept.

Swipe Again carries one guarantee, stated once and kept: Recover $179 in 30 days, guaranteed — or Swipe Again is free the next 30 days.

Start the 14-day trial: app.swipeagain.com/signup — flat $179/month after the trial, no revenue share, cancel anytime.

The crossover, in numbers

The table below is arithmetic, not a price list. The 10% and 15% columns are illustrative shares, chosen because they make the math easy to check — they are not any vendor's actual price, and no vendor is named or quoted here. The only real price in the table is ours: $179 a month, flat. “Recovered per month” means the failed-payment revenue a tool actually brings back in that month.

Recovered per month	Illustrative cost at a 10% share	Illustrative cost at a 15% share	Swipe Again flat fee
$5,000	$500	$750	$179
$15,000	$1,500	$2,250	$179
$50,000	$5,000	$7,500	$179
$150,000	$15,000	$22,500	$179

Read the table the way an operator reads it: annually. At $15,000 recovered a month, the illustrative 10% share is $18,000 a year and the 15% share is $27,000 a year, against $2,148 a year flat. At $50,000 a month the illustrative shares are $60,000 and $90,000 a year. Nothing about the work changes across those rows — the same declines, the same retries, the same emails. Only the size of your book changes, and under a share, your bill is the thing that grows. Under a flat fee, your margin is.

One more honest note on reading any such table, including ours: a share is charged on recovered revenue as the tool defines and measures it. Before comparing any two tools, ask what counts as recovered — only payments the tool's own attempts saved, or everything that came back while the tool was switched on, including payments your platform's native retries or your own emails would have recovered anyway. The definition moves the bill more than a point of percentage does.

The incentive problem, in one page

Pricing is not just arithmetic; it decides what your vendor is rooting for. A revenue-share dunning tool is paid out of your leakage. Its revenue line and your failure line are the same line. That does not make the people behind it dishonest — plenty of share-priced tools do good work — but it builds three quiet misalignments into the relationship, and you should see them before you sign.

First, prevention pays them nothing. Work that reduces failures before they happen — prompting a card update before a card expires, timing a first attempt better — shrinks the pool a share is taken from. A flat-fee vendor can afford to do that work gladly, because its fee was never a cut of your failures. Ours is the same $179 whether your failure rate rises or falls.

Second, attribution gets generous. When the vendor's pay depends on what counts as recovered, every borderline case — the payment that recovered on a native retry while the tool was also emailing — tends to be counted in the vendor's favor. With a flat fee there is nothing riding on the count, which is why we can stamp every recovered dollar to the specific attempt that recovered it — retry, card update, or save offer — and show you the cases that gave up, too.

Third, your best month is their best invoice. A seasonal spike, a successful launch, a price rise that lifts every renewal — under a share, each one raises your recovery bill in the same month it raises your revenue, so success arrives with a tax attached. Flat pricing is boring on purpose: the line item is identical in your best month and your worst, and you can budget it in January for the whole year.

When revenue share is honestly cheaper

Below a certain recovery volume, the share wins, and pretending otherwise would make this page an ad instead of a comparison. The break-even is one division: $179 divided by the share. At an illustrative 10% share, flat starts winning once you recover more than $1,790 a month. At an illustrative 15% share, the line is about $1,193 a month. Below those lines — a small, young book, or a business whose failures are rare and sporadic — a percentage costs less in absolute dollars, because a small share of a small number beats a fixed fee.

Two qualifications, both honest. The first is trajectory: the crossover is not a place you visit once. If your book is growing, you cross it and keep going, and the share's cost keeps climbing on the far side while the flat fee stays where it was. The second is what the small-book months are actually buying under each model. Under a share, a quiet month costs little and buys the full tool. Under our flat fee, a quiet month costs $179 — which is exactly why the offer is structured the way it is: a 14-day trial to see your own failure volume worked before you pay anything, and the pricing question answered with your numbers, not our table.

Context for how quickly books cross the line: by most industry estimates, first attempts fail on roughly 5–15% of monthly charge value. A business billing $30,000 a month in renewals might see $1,500 to $4,500 fail; recovering even part of that at the commonly cited dedicated-layer band of about 45–60% puts recovered volume near or past the break-even lines above. Run your own billing total through that range before you decide which shape you are.

More questions

Is the 10% or 15% in the table what other tools actually charge?

No, and the table does not claim it is. Those shares are illustrative arithmetic so you can check the crossover math yourself. Any vendor's actual price is on that vendor's pricing page, in its current form — ask them what counts as recovered revenue while you are there, because the definition matters as much as the rate.

What does Swipe Again charge on top of the $179?

Nothing per recovery. No percentage of recovered revenue, no per-save fee, no tier that unlocks recovery or cancel deflection at a higher price. Failed-payment recovery and cancel deflection are both in the one flat fee, across Stripe, Recharge, Chargebee, Recurly, Paddle, Seal, Skio, Braintree, and Loop for dunning, plus Shopify subscription apps and WooCommerce.

What if I recover less than $179 in a slow month?

Then that month the flat fee was the more expensive shape — that is the honest trade, and it is why the break-even section above exists. Judge the fee across a quarter of your real recovery volume, not your quietest month, and start with the 14-day trial so the first evidence is your own backlog, backfilled 90 days.

Does flat pricing change how hard the tool works my failures?

It changes what we can afford to optimize for: recovery rate and prevented failures, not billable recovered volume. The sequence is the same either way — decline-aware retries woven into Stripe's native schedule under a combined cap of 15, our ceiling at 8 attempts, payday timing out to about day 25, dunning emails on day 1, 3, and 7, texts capped at 3 with STOP language, and hard declines routed straight to a card update.

The companion guide is Flat Fee Dunning.

One more piece of the same puzzle: Flat-Fee Payment Recovery: $179/mo, No Revenue Share.

See also Failed Payment Recovery for Chargebee for the companion detail on this side of the problem.

One more piece of the same puzzle: Failed Payment Recovery for Braintree.

For the model itself — what flat fee dunning is, the mechanics it runs, and who it fits — see flat fee dunning.

What the named tools actually charge

Tool	Published price	Model
Swipe Again	$179/month	Flat fee
Churn Buster	$269/month one product; $430/month both	Flat tiers by MRR
Churnkey	$250/month billed yearly ($300 monthly)	Tiered by churn volume
Churnfree	From $49/month	Tiered plans
Butter	Not published	Revenue share
FlyCode	No platform fee	Share of recovery above baseline
Gravy	Not published	Custom quote
Stunning	Not published	Tiered by MRR

Prices checked October 2026 against each vendor’s public pricing page. Where a vendor does not publish a price, we say so rather than estimate one.

Updated October 2026.