Recurly Dunning That Recovers Failed Payments

Recurly bills your subscribers. Swipe Again saves the ones whose payments fail.

Recurly's built-in dunning runs campaigns on a fixed cadence with generic emails, then gives up. Swipe Again connects to your Recurly account and runs decline-code-aware retries, branded email/SMS/voice follow-up, and secure card updates — starting with the last 90 days of failures you already have.

What Recurly's built-in dunning can't do.

Recurly is a billing platform, and its dunning campaigns are a billing feature: retries and emails on a campaign cadence, and then a subscription that cancels itself quietly. What it doesn't do is read the failure. A card declined for insufficient funds wants a retry timed to payday; a card declined because it expired wants a card-update link, not a retry; a card declined with a hard "do not retry" code wants the card replaced, full stop. Treating all three the same is how recoverable subscribers become churn statistics.

The second gap is reach. Native dunning is email-only, written in the platform's voice, and it stops at the retry limit whether or not the subscriber ever saw it. Nobody's business should lose a subscriber who wanted to pay — over a message that landed in a spam folder. Our dunning management guide lays out the full discipline; this page is how it runs specifically on Recurly.

How Swipe Again runs Recurly dunning.

Failures flow in live. Recurly's invoice payment-failed webhook streams every failed payment into Swipe Again the moment it happens, with its decline reason attached.

Retries follow the decline code. Each failure is routed by cause: soft declines get a retry schedule timed to when the money is likely to be there; expired and replaced cards get a secure, branded card-update flow instead of blind retries; hard declines stop wasting attempts. The code-by-code logic is the same one in our decline codes guide — it just runs on Recurly's failures too. Retries re-attempt collection on the past-due Recurly invoice itself — and each one checks the invoice's live state first.

Follow-up sounds like you. Branded email on days 1, 3 and 7 — your name, your color, your voice — with SMS and voice available as opt-in channels. Every recovered dollar shows up in one dashboard, attributed to the attempt that won it.

Your backlog is worked, not written off. On connect, the last 90 days of failed Recurly payments are pulled in automatically and put through the same sequences. The first recoveries usually come from failures that predate your signup.

Connect Recurly in about two minutes.

01 — Paste an API key. In Recurly, go to Integrations → API Credentials, copy a v3 API key, and paste it into Swipe Again. No code, no developer.

02 — Add the webhook. In Integrations → Webhooks, add the address the setup flow hands you for payment-failed events, and paste the webhook secret Recurly gives you back into Swipe Again.

03 — You’re live. Recurly’s dunning campaigns can stay on: Swipe Again’s collection checks each invoice’s live state before attempting, so it never stacks on a collection Recurly already has in flight.

Then confirm Smart Recovery is on in your dashboard. Recurly is one of nine platforms on the integrations page — the same recovery runs on all of them, and merchants with more than one stack see every dollar in one place. See how the same model runs on Recharge, or start with the full discipline in our dunning management guide.

One flat price. Both products.

Swipe Again is $179/month flat ($1,799/year) — Recurly dunning, cancel deflection, all nine platforms, no percentage of recovered revenue and no per-seat math. Full detail on the pricing page.

The guarantee: Recover $179 in 30 days, guaranteed — or Swipe Again is free the next 30 days. Recovered revenue means every failed payment collected while Swipe Again is active, from any recovery source, as defined in Section 3 of our Terms. How we count: how Swipe Again counts recovered revenue

Three ways to chase a failed Recurly payment.

Recurly's dunning campaigns. Retries and emails on a campaign cadence, then the subscription cancels itself. They never read the decline code, never ask for a new card, and never look backward at the failures already sitting in your account. They are a billing feature, not a recovery system.

Percentage-of-recovery tools. Recovery apps that charge a share of every dollar they win back — outcome-based pricing, as their own FAQs describe it. The better they work, the more they cost, and the bill peaks in exactly the months your payment failures are worst.

Swipe Again. One flat $179/month, no percentage of recovered revenue, whether it recovers $200 or $20,000. Decline-code-aware retries re-attempt collection on your past-due Recurly invoices — each checked against the invoice's live state first — branded dunning and card-update pages work the failures a retry can't fix, and the last 90 days of failures are pulled in on connect — for the same flat price.

Card upfront · First charge day 15 · Cancel anytime

Questions, answered.

What software helps recover failed payments on Recurly?

Swipe Again. It connects to your Recurly account and runs the recovery: decline-code-aware retries that re-attempt collection on the past-due Recurly invoice, on a schedule set by why each payment failed, branded dunning emails on days 1, 3 and 7 with SMS follow-up, and a secure card-update page when the card — not the timing — is the problem. On connect it also pulls in your last 90 days of failed payments. One flat $179/month, no percentage of recovered revenue, with a 30-day guarantee: recover $179 in 30 days, or the next 30 days are free.

Will Swipe Again and Recurly collect on the same invoice twice?

No. Every Swipe Again collection checks the invoice’s live state in Recurly first and never stacks on a collection already in flight — if the invoice has been paid, closed, or is being worked, the attempt doesn’t fire.

What happens to failures from before I connected?

They're pulled in automatically — the last 90 days of failed payments get worked through the same retry and dunning sequences as new failures.

Do my subscribers see Swipe Again's name?

No. Dunning emails and card-update pages carry your name, your email address, and your brand color. Subscribers experience it as your store following up — because it is.