Pre-dunning: the emails you send before a payment fails

Most failed-payment strategy is reactive: a charge fails, then you scramble to recover it with a sequence of emails. That's dunning, and it works. But the highest-converting recovery isn't recovery at all, it's prevention. Pre-dunning is the practice of reaching out to a customer before their payment fails, while the subscription is still healthy, to fix the problem before it becomes one.

Dunning vs pre-dunning

Dunning is what you do after a payment fails: a series of emails prompting the customer to update their card and pay the overdue charge. Pre-dunning is what you do before: a proactive heads-up when you can see a failure coming, typically a card about to expire, so the customer updates it ahead of the renewal and the charge never fails at all. One cleans up a break; the other prevents it.

Why pre-dunning converts best

Reaching a customer before the failure is easier in every way. Their subscription still works, so there's no frustration or urgency-driven churn, just a small, friendly favor. There's no lapse in service to explain or apologize for. And you're catching them at a calm moment rather than after something visibly broke. A failure you prevent is worth more than one you recover, because prevention avoids the whole risky window where a customer might just give up.

When pre-dunning is possible

You can only pre-empt a failure you can see coming, and the clearest signal is an expiring card. Every saved card has a known expiration date, so you can identify, ahead of time, exactly which subscriptions are about to hit a wall, and warn those customers before the renewal. Card expiration is the most predictable cause of failed payments, which makes it the ideal target for pre-dunning.

How to do it right

• Watch for cards approaching their expiration date before the next charge.
• Send a clear, low-pressure heads-up: their card is expiring, here's a one-click way to update it.
• Keep the tone helpful, not alarming, nothing has gone wrong yet, and you're helping them avoid an interruption.
• For the failures pre-dunning can't prevent, fall back to a proper post-failure recovery sequence.

Pre-dunning plus recovery, on top of Stripe

Stripe's Smart Retries react after a charge fails, and they help, but they don't warn a customer before an expiring card breaks the payment. Recoupe adds the pre-dunning layer, expiring-card warnings that prevent failures, alongside a recovery sequence for the ones that slip through, and only credits a recovery when a customer acted on a Recoupe email. It's the visible, customer-facing layer Stripe's silent retries don't provide.

See how much of your involuntary churn is preventable, starting with the cards about to expire. A free 90-day audit shows exactly what's recoverable and what you can get ahead of.

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