Automatically recover involuntary churn from failed payments with smart dunning emails.

Failed Payment Recovery (Dunning)

Windback automatically detects failed payments and sends a series of smart, AI-generated dunning emails to help customers update their payment method before their subscription is lost.

How It Works

When a payment fails, Windback:

Detects the failure via your Stripe webhook (invoice.payment_failed)
Creates a payment failure record with status failing
Generates an AI dunning email with the appropriate tone
Sends the email to the customer
Retries on a schedule — up to 4 attempts over 7 days
Auto-recovers when payment succeeds (invoice.payment_succeeded)

Retry Schedule

Retry	Day	Tone	Style
1	Day 1	Gentle Reminder	"Heads up, your payment didn't go through"
2	Day 3	Urgency	"Your subscription is at risk"
3	Day 5	Help Offer	"Need help updating payment? We're here"
4	Day 7	Final Warning	"Last chance before access is paused"

After the 4th attempt, the failure is marked as abandoned.

Webhook Events

Windback handles these Stripe webhook events for dunning:

`invoice.payment_failed`

Triggered when a subscription payment fails. Windback will:

Create or update a payment failure record
Schedule the first dunning email
Begin the retry sequence

`invoice.payment_succeeded`

Triggered when a previously failed payment succeeds. Windback will:

Mark the payment failure as recovered
Cancel any pending retries
Log the recovery for your dashboard stats

Make sure both invoice.payment_failed and invoice.payment_succeeded events are enabled in your Stripe webhook configuration.

Payment Failure Statuses

Status	Description
`failing`	Payment has failed, dunning emails are being sent
`recovered`	Customer updated their payment and the charge succeeded
`abandoned`	All retry attempts exhausted without recovery

Dashboard

Navigate to Failed Payments in the sidebar to view:

Stats cards — Failing count, recovered count, MRR at risk, recovery rate
Payment failures table — Filterable by status, with retry progress
Detail view — Click any row to see the dunning email timeline

API Reference

List Payment Failures

GET /api/v1/projects/:slug/payment-failures

Query parameters:

status — Filter by failing, recovered, or abandoned
limit — Results per page (default 20, max 100)
offset — Pagination offset

Get Payment Failure Detail

GET /api/v1/projects/:slug/payment-failures/:id

Returns the payment failure with its full dunning email timeline.

Get Payment Failure Stats

GET /api/v1/projects/:slug/payment-failures/stats

Returns:

{
  "data": {
    "total_failing": 12,
    "total_recovered": 45,
    "total_abandoned": 8,
    "mrr_at_risk_cents": 120000,
    "mrr_recovered_cents": 450000,
    "recovery_rate": 69.2
  }
}

Setup

Failed payment recovery works automatically once you've connected your Stripe webhook. No additional configuration is needed beyond what's described in the Stripe integration guide.

Make sure your webhook URL includes both payment events:

invoice.payment_failed
invoice.payment_succeeded
customer.subscription.deleted (for voluntary churn)

Failed Payment Recovery

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