CardChase
Failed payment recovery software
Thirteen tools touch failed subscription charges, and they are not the same purchase. Seven are dedicated recovery products, two are billing or payment platforms you would move onto rather than add, one is an analytics suite with recovery bolted on, one is a funnel builder, one works upstream on the approval rather than the retry, and one is already switched on inside your Stripe account. Below is what each one’s own site publishes about price — read on 2026-09-10— and what it actually is.
| TOOL | WHAT ITS OWN SITE PUBLISHES ABOUT PRICE | WHAT IT IS, AND WHO IT IS FOR |
|---|---|---|
| CardChase | $9/month, flat, so the price does not move with your MRR or with what it recovers. The live demo needs no account at all. | Failed-payment recovery for Stripe subscriptions, and nothing else. Every retry and every message is staged for your approval first, and a hard-declined card is never reattempted. Retries are capped at 4 per customer. |
| Churn Buster | $430/mo for the Complete Retention Solution, based on MRR. | A retention platform covering failed payments and cancellations, sold with a retention specialist attached. Buy it if you want cancel flows and win-back as well as dunning. |
| Stunning | Banded by MRR, and charged as a flat fee rather than a percentage of recoveries. | A long-running Stripe dunning tool: failed-payment email, card-expiry notices and recovery pages. It sends on the schedule you configure rather than staging each message for approval. |
| Gravy | No published price. Its pricing page is a quote request. | Human-assisted recovery: real people work high-value failed payments alongside the software. It pays for itself when the failed charges are large, and rarely on ordinary monthly subscriptions. |
| Baremetrics Recover | Payment Recovery +$129/mo, on top of a base plan starting at $49/mo (Launch). | Subscription analytics first, recovery as an add-on switched on top of it. Recovery is the second thing you buy here, not the first. |
| Butter Payments | No published price. Our pricing model is a revenue share. Butter takes a small percentage of the revenue associated with each invoice recovered through the Butter platform. | Machine-learning failed-payment recovery for subscription businesses, sold through a conversation and a payment health analysis. Its own claim is: "Our machine learning tech optimizes failed payment recovery, leading to 10%+ ARR growth." |
| Slicker | No published figure — performance-based pricing, which the site frames as Prove ROI before you pay. | AI retry timing and dunning email for subscription businesses, running through your existing payment rails. The closest thing on this list to a like-for-like alternative, priced on results rather than a flat fee. |
| Stripe Billing Smart Retries | Included with Stripe Billing — no separate line item. | Stripe's own retry engine, already switched on for most accounts. The recommended default setting is 8 tries within 2 weeks. It retries; it does not write your customers in your voice or hold anything for approval. |
| sticky.io | No published price; the site's pricing route ends at a demo booking. | A headless CRM, checkout and funnel builder for ecommerce and performance marketers, with recovery as one module inside it: "Revenue Recovery & Smart Dunning — Recover up to 75% of declined transactions." Bought for the funnel, not for the dunning. |
| Recurly | No published price. Request pricing details is the call to action. | A subscription billing platform with revenue-optimisation built in. This is a replacement for Stripe Billing, not something you add to it — a different purchase from everything else on this list. |
| Solidgate | No published price; entry is a demo request. | Payment infrastructure, not a recovery tool: Solidgate offers a comprehensive payment orchestration solution and multi-region payment infrastructure. You would move your payments onto it, rather than add it beside them. |
| FlyCode | Outcome-based pricing. No published figure — Pay only a percentage of incremental recovered revenue above your baseline. No seats, no minimums, no setup fees. | Machine-learning retry timing and dunning for Stripe and Shopify subscriptions, sold on the recovery it produces rather than a subscription fee. The word doing the work in that price is “incremental”: the percentage is charged on recovery above an agreed baseline, so what you pay depends on a number negotiated before you start. |
| Revaly | No published price. The site's own Pricing link resolves to a 404, whose call to action is contact sales. | Approval-rate optimisation rather than dunning: Revaly is a Payment Performance Management platform that maximizes approvals, reduces involuntary churn, and protects recurring revenue. Its lever sits upstream of everything else on this list — it works on the charge before it fails, not on the customer after it has. |
What is failed payment recovery software?
Failed payment recovery software retries a subscription charge the bank refused, and writes the customer when retrying will not be enough. It exists because most subscription cancellations are not decisions: Butter Payments puts failed payments at 10%+of top-line ARR for the businesses it works with, and the category name for that loss — involuntary churn — is the thing every tool on this page is sold against. The work splits into three parts: deciding whether a given decline may be retried at all, choosing when to retry it, and telling the customer. Tools differ mostly in the first and third.
Which failed payment recovery tools publish a price?
Three of the thirteen publish a number you can read without talking to anyone: Churn Buster ($430/mo), Baremetrics Recover (Payment Recovery +$129/mo) and CardChase. Stunning publishes a slider rather than a figure — Banded by MRR. Gravy, Butter Payments, Slicker, FlyCode, Revaly, Recurly, Solidgate and sticky.io publish none: every one of those routes ends at a form, and Revaly’s ends at a 404 — The site's own Pricing link resolves to a 404. That is not a criticism of any of them, but it is the single biggest difference between the two halves of this list, because a price you cannot see is a price set after someone has looked at your revenue.
Is Stripe’s built-in Smart Retries enough on its own?
For many businesses, yes, and any honest comparison starts there. Smart Retries ships with Stripe Billing at no extra cost and needs no integration: The recommended default setting is 8 tries within 2 weeks. It also enforces the rule that matters most — in Stripe’s own words a hard decline code means the issuing bank has rejected the transaction and you can't retry it — and it will not execute those charges however you configure it. What it does not do is write your customers in your voice, put a human in the loop before anything goes out, or give you one place to see what was refused and why. Every paid tool on this list is selling one or more of those three things on top of retries you already have.
Does percentage-of-recovered pricing cost more than a flat fee?
It costs more exactly when the tool works, which is the trade. Butter Payments states its model plainly — Butter takes a small percentage of the revenue associated with each invoice recovered through the Butter platform — and Slicker frames the same posture as Prove ROI before you pay. The appeal is real: you pay nothing if nothing comes back. The cost is that recovery gets more expensive as it gets better, and the bill scales with the revenue rather than with the work. FlyCode states the part that decides the bill more plainly than anyone else on this list: Pay only a percentage of incremental recovered revenue above your baseline. The percentage is charged on recovery above a baseline, so the number that governs what you pay is not the rate you are quoted — it is the baseline agreed before you start, and no vendor on this page publishes how theirs is set. Stunning is the counter-example inside the same category, and says so: charged as a flat fee rather than a percentage of recoveries. CardChase takes the flat side too.
Which of these are not really recovery tools?
Three, and they show up in this search because of what surrounds their recovery features rather than because of the features. Recurly is a billing platform — you would move subscription billing off Stripe onto it, which is a migration, not an addition. Solidgate is payment infrastructure: a comprehensive payment orchestration solution and multi-region payment infrastructure. sticky.io sells a headless CRM and funnel builder to ecommerce and performance marketers, with recovery as a module. If your question is “my Stripe subscriptions are failing, what do I add?”, none of the three is the answer to it.
How many times can you retry a failed charge before you break a card-network rule?
Fifteen, and only for the declines that permit any reattempt at all. Visa sorts authorization response codes into four categories and its published rule for the first one is not a recommendation: When a Category 1 (Issuer will never approve) decline code is used, the merchant is not permitted to reattempt the transaction. Category 2 — the issuer cannot approve right now — is where recoverable declines live, and there the same document allows a merchant to reattempt up to 15 times in 30 days. A retry schedule that treats every decline alike will eventually reattempt a card reported stolen; it recovers nothing and accrues against a rule your acquirer is measured on. CardChase caps at 4 attempts per customer, inside the 15-reattempt ceiling, and stops permanently on any of three independent hard-decline signals.
Which one should you pick?
- Already on Stripe Billing and not yet losing much: turn on Smart Retries and buy nothing.
- Failed payments large enough that a person working each one pays for itself: Gravy.
- Cancel flows and win-back as well as dunning: Churn Buster.
- Already paying for Baremetrics: Recover is one switch.
- Happy to pay a share of what comes back, in exchange for paying nothing when it does not: Butter Payments or Slicker.
- A flat price, and every retry and message read by a person before it goes out, with a hard stop on cards the network has permanently refused: CardChase.
Where these numbers come from
Every vendor claim on this page is quoted out of this site’s claim register, and each entry records the vendor page it was read from and the date it was last re-fetched — most recently 2026-09-10. The quotes are enforced in code rather than proofread: a clause that no longer appears in the registered value fails this page’s build instead of going quietly stale. Where a vendor publishes no price, that absence is registered as a fact rather than filled in with an estimate, and figures circulating on other comparison sites are not repeated here.
This page is https://cardchase.thecompound.tech/failed-payment-recovery-software, word for word, captured 2026-09-13.