Failed Payment Recovery Agent

Failed payments are the quietest way to lose revenue: a card expires, the retries fail, and nobody notices until the customer is gone. This agent picks up every failed charge, pulls the real invoice and subscription state out of Stripe, and leaves a friendly, accurate email in your drafts with one line in Slack so you know it happened. It never retries a charge or touches a subscription, so recovery stays a decision you make.

What people use it for

• Catch involuntary churn early - A large share of subscription cancellations start as a card that simply expired. Reaching the customer on day one, while they still remember paying you, is what turns that back into revenue.
• Emails that quote real numbers - The amount, the plan, the invoice, and the date all come from Stripe rather than from a template with blanks. Customers respond faster to a message that clearly refers to their actual account.
• One Slack line, not a dashboard - Nobody logs into Stripe to check for failures every morning. The channel gets a single line per failed charge with the reason and whether it needs a person.
• Big accounts get a human - A templated dunning note to your largest customer is a bad first move. Accounts your policy marks as high value skip the draft entirely and get flagged for someone to call.

Before you fork

What do I need to connect before it runs?

A Stripe connection that can receive the failed charge event and read customers, charges, invoices, and subscriptions, a Gmail account to hold the drafts, and the Slack channel you want the alerts in. You then write your dunning policy and a short description of what your business sells. Both are plain English, and the staged test runs show you the drafts they produce.

Can it retry a charge or cancel a customer?

No. It is wired to Stripe read operations only, so retrying, refunding, editing a payment method, and cancelling a subscription are all outside what it can do. Its writing tools are a Gmail draft and a Slack message, and every email still needs a person to press send.

What does it cost to run?

One agent run per failed charge, so a quiet month costs almost nothing and a bad card batch costs a little more. Each run does a handful of Stripe reads and writes one draft, so it stays short. If your retry settings mean the same invoice fails several times, the agent sees the failure count and flags the repeats instead of drafting the same email again.