Redux Payments

Turning failed payments into profits. Redux helps subscription brands recover 5–8% more ARR by optimizing failed payment recovery. No migrations. No engineering. Only pay on lift above your current Stripe recovery baseline.

Co-Founder & CEO

PEF Community

Member

Workspace6

Workspace6 is a private vetted community for 7-9 figure eCommerce operators. Over 1000+ members doing a combined $13bn in annual revenue.

Co-Founder

STNGR Industries 

Co-Founder (Acquired)

PostPurchaseSurvey.com

PostPurchaseSurvey.com allows you to make more money and build a stronger relationship with your customers by allowing you to collect zero party data directly from your customers. Navigate the iOS14 changes by letting your customers tell you where they heard about you to better calculate ROAS and spend more profitably in the future.

Founder (Acquired)

Exited my eCommerce brand | Co-Founder at Workspace6.io & MediaSpace | Helping B2B startups understand brand psychology to boost sales

I started a direct-to-consumer brand with $188 at 17. Grew it to 8-figures in sales and sold for 7-figures. 

Then I co-founded a 1,000 member private community for 7-9 figure operators. Combined member revenue is over $13bn. 

Now I run Redux Payments, where we use AI to recover failed payments and fix involuntary churn for subscription businesses.

This is the problem I’m obsessed with solving. I write about what I find, what works, and what doesn’t. I’m always down to nerd out if you want to jam!

————————————————————————

Now building:

Redux Payments (reduxpayments.com) - Stop losing revenue to failed payments. We slash involuntary churn and grow ARR by 8%+ for subscription businesses by using AI to recover failed payments.

Workspace6.io - The fastest growing private eCommerce community for 7-9 figure operators. 950+ members doing $13bn GMV.

————————————————————————

You can reach me via email: philip (at) reduxpayments.com

Stripe missed $2,679,930.39 in failed payments for one B2C app we audited.

And that’s with everything “working as expected.”

B2C subscription businesses using Stripe billing (and that’s a lot of you):

Your Stripe failed payments recovery engine is decent. Recovers for millions of businesses, does an ok job at it. 

But it’s not running at full power.

Here's how most failed payments go:

Credit card fails -> Stripe retries a few times -> generic templated emails go out -> then retries stop -> your customer churns -> nobody notices

And this means that every month, you're leaking revenue from failed payments, not to mention lost customers.

Maybe you see the orange failed payments bar on your Stripe dashboard 
And think it’s normal, no big deal, it’s just the default

Yeah, maybe it is common. 

But you’re leaving money on the table.

Redux Payments was built to bolt on and fix that.

Here’s what we’ve seen it do this year:

- $100K to 150K extra per year recovered for $10m ARR B2C SaaS apps
- Pure lift above Stripe. No effort
- Free margin you didn’t have to acquire again

It does this through:

- Intelligent retry logic tuned to card type, timing, and error patterns
- Real-time optimization that gets better the more it runs
- Filtering out hard declines to protect approval rates

Think of Redux as the turbocharger for Stripe billing.

You're not replacing the engine, or rebuilding the system.

Just more recovered revenue, month after month.

You already built your product.
You already earned your customer.
Redux just makes sure you keep them.

And the kicker?

Same-day plug-in
No engineering work
We only get paid on what we recover

If you’re using Stripe billing and haven’t optimized failed payments, you’re driving a Porsche without the turbo.

Let’s change that. We’ll show you exactly what your recovery gap looks like. 

Free audit. No fluff. Just your numbers, your loss, and what to do about it. 

Drop a comment and I’ll take a look.

Philip Pages

CEO @ Redux Payments | Stop losing money to credit card failures | Exited Founder

Here is my journey as an entrepreneur so far:

2006 (7 years old) — Cut coconuts off trees and sold them for $.25 each

2010 (12 years old) — Bought my first stock and started daytrading

2016 (17 years old) — Came up with the idea of selling tactical gear online. Launched with $188 and shipped orders from my bedroom

2017 (18 years old) — Started 2 new companies. Rollerblade wheels for office chairs and curated party supply kits. Both failed

2018 (19 years old) — Skipped college to go all in on the tactical brand. Did $1.5m in revenue and thought I was untouchable

2019 (20 years old) — Overhired, overbought inventory and almost went bankrupt. Booked a $100,000 loss. 

2020 (21 years old) — Covid hit and online sales boomed. Hit multiple 7-figures in revenue 

2021 (22 years old) — Started an electric toothbrush brand. The Kickstarter raised $10,000 but ultimately failed

2022 (23 years old) — Launched a B2B SaaS and co-founded a private founders community

2023 (24/25 years old) — Sold the B2B SaaS for 5-figures, sold the tactical gear brand for 7-figures

2024/25 (26 years old) — Became obsessed with failed payments and launched a B2B SaaS to solve them  

The truth is, entrepreneurship is hard.

It’s a rollercoaster of setbacks and breakthroughs.

But I wouldn’t trade it for anything.

Every lesson shaped who I’ve become.

Every failure made the next success possible.

I hope sharing this inspires someone to stop waiting for perfect and just launch.

Because the real magic only happens once you start.

August was not what I expected

At the beginning of each month, I sit at my desk with my notebook and coffee and put my month’s goals to paper

Reflecting back now, we met big milestones - increased recovery across Redux Payments portfolio, are now sitting at approx 20-30% lift above baseline, and signed our biggest customer to date 

We also made some mid-month pivots to strategy that I’d not anticipated, but were ultimately the right move.

Here’s what went well, what we learned, and what’s next:
__

Wins:

-We’ve got our clearest product direction yet. After a few false starts with positioning, we’ve dialed in on our ICP. We pitched a lot of people, saw what prospects were resonating with/what they weren’t. Now we’re only focusing only on prospects who acutely feel the pain of credit card failures and who are actively looking for a solution. 

-Our early customers are seeing meaningful lift and we’re ruthlessly focused on compounding those results. The goal is to ship more case studies this month 

-Internally, we’re building a strong product culture. Every decision anchors back to our North Star question: “How do we make our customers more money?” If it doesn’t serve that, we don’t ship it. Product is everything right now. 
__

Learnings:

- We’ve launched a few new features in test environments. Not all of them landed. Some caused issues that had me up till 1:30 am debugging with Andrew Kang. But we’re learning fast, fixing fast, and surfacing better UX ideas because of it

-The more time I spend talking directly to customers, the faster we evolve the product in the right direction. Feature creep is a risk, but so is building in isolation. We’re learning how to walk that line.

-If someone asks for a feature we don’t have and don’t plan to build because it doesn’t align with Redux’s focus, we tell them. We’ve turned away more prospects than we’ve onboarded, intentionally. That honesty has paid off with higher conversions, trust, and better-fit customers.
__

Roadmap for September:

-We are designing a fully revamped dashboard: new design, clearer UX, cleaner data. Our goal is to make customers say “holy sh*t” when they log in, not just “oh, it works.”

-Continuing to iterate on the recovery engine itself. Recovery logic is being refined week by week. We’re shipping improvements that show up in better recovery rates for our customers.

-Tightening the onboarding flow to reduce friction, so setup is fast, clear, and gets users to first value without manual lift.

-A few more features that drive more recovered revenue (more to come 🤫)

__

We’ve got the clearest view yet of what we’re building, who it’s for, and how we win. September’s already in motion. 

Let’s have a killer month

Let’s play a game

Would you rather spend $10K to acquire 100 new customers… or 10 minutes (no $ spent) to keep 100 paying ones you already have?

Because every month, you’re ignoring option 2.

And not to be mean (well maybe just a little)
But if you’re missing this, you're failing MBA 101. 

You already paid to acquire the customer. You ran the ads, nailed the onboarding, got them loving your product. Then their card expired... and you let them…churn ??

“It’s cheaper to keep a customer than acquire one. No s***.”
 - Me, quoting every business school professor who’s ever lived
 
And if you’ve ever run paid acquisition, you know this math:
 
- CAC is rising
- Retargeting is expensive
- Churn kills LTV

Let’s be clear:

“Failed payments are the easiest form of churn to fix.”
 - Also me, trying not to lose my mind watching this happen every day

Yeah, voluntary churn - customers who actually want to leave and leave - a little complicated to fix. Requires some input and trial and error. 

But involuntary churn? Mechanical issue. Straightforward to fix. 

Steal my playbook:

1/ Recognize it’s dumb to lose paying customers (already done, good)

2/ Have an intelligent retry engine handling your subscription payments. Shameless plug: Redux Payments layers on top of your existing Stripe engine, gets you 10-20% more revenue. Try it. 

3/ Stop sending garbage emails that feel like debt collections.

4/ Fix the landing experience -> Make the card update process seamless and automatic.

Do this, and you’ll recover both the customers and revenue you already earned, but lost. 

It’s not free money, but it’s as close to free money as you’re ever gonna get.

And who doesn’t love that?

Mid-sentence. Mid-scroll.
You see it.

“Payment failed”

It’s red.
It’s loud.

And it’s everywhere.

You dive into the Stripe dashboard.

Same decline. Over and over.
"Insufficient funds."

You think, “Well… that’s that.”
Customer’s broke. Nothing I can do.

Except that’s not true.
Not even close.

Insufficient funds is the most recoverable error in payments.
And it shows up... a lot.
40%+ of all failed payments in our dataset.

The mistake?
Most teams just… give up.
They mark the user as churned and move on.

But here’s what nobody tells you:
That customer isn’t gone.
They just didn’t get paid yet.

You don’t need to write a breakup email.
You need to retry… at the right time.

Like Friday mornings.
9AM local time.
When paychecks hit.

NYC? 9AM EST.
London? 9AM GMT.
Sydney? 9AM AEST.

Not random retries.
Not “one-size-fits-all” schedules.

You want recovery?
You need precision.

Because a failed payment isn’t always a no.
Sometimes it’s just a not yet.

It was the end of 2020, I was closing out a $3.5M year with STNGR and tallying up vendor reports to see what kind of lift our tools had delivered. I punched in the numbers, then looked at my calculator in disbelief. They didn't match.

$5.6M stared back at me

I immediately picked up the phone and called our CFO

Unless my brand had started printing money while I was asleep, someone was fudging numbers to the tune of 160%

After a long conversation with our CFO and hours of digging later, we figured out what had happened.

It had started earlier that year

As a consumer brand owner, I got pitched constantly. Every other week, someone had a tool that was “definitely” going to drive more revenue. 

Messages like:

“Our personalization engine boosts average order value by 23%, no dev work needed.” 

“We’ll retarget abandoned carts with email and ad sequences! Your sales will explode.”

Cool. I like more revenue. Who doesn’t?

So we onboarded those tools and let them run.

But when I actually pulled the numbers at the end of the year, those tools had supposedly driven 160% of our revenue for the year

Come to find out, it was because every vendor had claimed their feature tipped the scale

Cannibalization at its finest. Each vendor had their own dashboard, their own attribution model, their own flavor of ROI voodoo.

One tool said it recovered the sale because it sent a cart reminder, the other claimed the credit because the customer clicked their popup the day before.

Everyone was inflating their attribution to prove their worth.

So yeah, we paid a lot of vendors to do the same thing… and claim credit where credit was in fact NOT due

That experience burned itself into my brain. So when I built Redux Payments, I promised myself it wouldn’t work this way.

Here’s what we do now:

We start with a clean baseline. Before anything goes live, we audit your data. This shows what your actual failed payment recovery performance is today. 

And only then do we run.

That way you see the delta, and know exactly what Redux adds.

That’s what I wanted as a founder.

So that’s what we built.

I’m curious if this is only me or what. Has this happened to anyone else?

I failed a Duolingo payment just to see what would happen. 

“We don’t want an angry bird.” The owl came for me. 

One minute I was ignoring my Spanish lesson.
The next, I was getting chased down like I owed Duo money (I did).

If your recovery flow isn’t that aggressive, you’re leaving money on the table.

Behind the angry owl is a system designed to minimize failed payment churn.

It’s structured, immediate, and effective.

The top players all do this.

Netflix. Spotify. Duolingo.
They’ve built failed payment recovery into a system. Because they know that lost revenue isn’t a billing issue. It’s a growth leak.

They build failed payment recovery into their revenue infrastructure. 

Because involuntary churn isn’t about intent.
The customer didn’t cancel on purpose. 
They didn’t rage-quit.

They just failed a payment, because the card expired, funds were low, or the bank declined it.

And if your system isn’t built to handle that? Well, your customer disappears.

That’s a preventable revenue leak.

At scale, it adds up fast.
1% here, 2% there - suddenly you’re missing a salary’s worth of revenue every month.

Revenue you already earned.

That’s why the best companies treat recovery like a core lever.

It’s indirect growth.
It makes every acquisition dollar go further.
It stretches your LTV without needing to ship new features or hire another rep.

And most importantly, it’s so easy to fix.

3 weeks ago, I found myself in conversation with the HBO MAX Manager PM who retained 1.4 MILLION subscribers last year 

I was ranting - as one does - about how a subscriber’s credit card failing isn’t some grand gesture of churn.

It’s usually just recovery friction. Card expired, system sucks

Then someone drops the classic line:

“If they *really* wanted the subscription, they’d update their card.”

Oh, cool. Great insight. Super helpful.

Meanwhile, I’ve audited payment flows from $10M–$30M ARR companies that feel like navigating the Minotaur’s labyrinth.

Click here. Now log in. Now re-enter your zip code from college.

Oh, you gave up? Guess you didn’t *really* want it.

Anyways… back to HBO.

Taylor O'Brien, who led their retention (the guy responsible for retaining 1.4 million (!!) streaming subscribers last year), jumps into the thread to add an additional point, so I’m all ears.

And what he said stuck:

"It's too easy in the payments space to view subs as a revenue number and to take an adversarial perspective that these customers are ‘skipping out on payments’ “

But in reality?

“It's almost always a mistake/oversight, and in less frequent cases, a customer trying to navigate a very difficult financial situation. Leading with empathy can turn a potentially very negative and embarrassing situation into a strongly retentive and positive customer experience.”

Empathy. 

Simple. Obvious. And yet…

Half of y’all are out here sending “last warning” emails like you’re about to repo someone’s Hulu account.

Here’s the thing:

If your brand voice is fun, welcoming, and clear during acquisition and onboarding…

 …and then turns cold and transactional when something breaks?

That disconnect *immediately* breaks trust.

You could build the cleanest, lowest-friction card update flow in the world, but if your message reads like

“Update your card now or we’ll kick your dog,”

you’re not getting them back.

You’re getting a block.

So yeah , fix your flows.
But also: fix your tone.

Be more like HBO, ok?

In the AI era, everyone thinks they’re Tony Stark in a garage with a compiler.

The typical $10–30M ARR B2C subscription company right now:

Product’s solid
Retention’s decent
AI’s feeling like a cheat code

So they start… (vibe?) building *everything*

Internal billing platform
Custom CRM
Rebuilding Intercom’s chatbot for fun
Oh look, now we’re rewriting Mixpanel from the ground up

Flash forward 2 years:

CFO’s thrilled (costs controlled, excellent)
Growth’s flat
Board’s confused

And some startup that didn’t exist 18 months ago just lapped you…because *they* spent all that extra AI leverage on making the product better, not reinventing back-office plumbing

Here’s the thing: time’s not on your side.

In the AI age, you’re not the only one moving faster - your competitors are too. 

Every hour spent on side quest non-core tooling is a tax on speed, focus, and excellence. 

Yeah, you can build in-house. And run it at 60–80% of what a specialist does at 100%. With none of their data, optimization loops, or edge-case handling.

So no, you don’t need to build *everything.* You need to build *the right* things, and outsource the rest to people who live and breathe it.

Otherwise? Best of luck on your in-house billing platform. Let me know how that goes.

Small % changes. Massive $$$ impact. It adds up so quickly

You broke out of Apple’s sandbox. Congrats. 

Feels good to keep that extra 30%, right? But there’s a catch (like when is there not)

When you left IAP, you ditched Apple’s tax.

You also ditched their full-stack failed payment recovery system 

Back on IAP, you got the full works:

 – Real-time credit card retries
 – In-app payment prompts
 – Auto-updated cards
 – Built-in lockouts

Now?

You’re on Stripe.
And Stripe gives you… infrastructure.

Which is exactly what it’s supposed to do. But that means the recovery layer? That’s on you.

No full stack recovery
No friction ramp from nudge to lockout
No “hey, your payment failed, click here, no login required!”

So… when a payment fails, that customer doesn’t get downgraded.
They just…leave

And it’s not because they rage-canceled.

The system just made it harder for them to stay

The apps leading the shift away from IAP (Spotify, Patreon, Match Group, Proton ) are building back fast

With recovery centered around mobile behavior:

– Retrying cards based on failure reason (not calendar time)
– Recovery notifications that don’t feel like collections notices
– Card update flows with no password walls
– Escalating gradually (not nuking the account on day three)
– One recovery brain coordinating it all

This kind of churn (if you don’t take care of it) is a slow but constant revenue leak

And as you scale, well… you’ll be setting your own money on fire.

You already acquired the user.
You already earned the revenue.
You just didn’t recover it.

So if you’re moving to Stripe, great.

Just don’t forget to rebuild what Apple used to handle for you

That’s how you get the margin *and* the retention.

I’m working hands-on with apps making the jump. If you’re even thinking about moving off IAP; I’m seeing what’s working behind the scenes and happy to share.

P.S. We built Redux Payments to help SaaS and mobile apps recover failed payments automatically. Works with Stripe. Boosts ARR. No engineering. Try it: https://lnkd.in/gma2MpYG

LA Fitness is being sued for "making it impossible to cancel." 

Good. Anyone that makes canceling subscriptions a nightmare deserves to step on a lego.

Here’s a summary of the FTC’s complaints against LA Fitness:

1/ Impossible to cancel: Memberships were hard to end and cancellation required either going to the gym in person or mailing a printed form.

2/ Login barriers: To even access the form, customers had to recall old credentials, key tag numbers, and partial payment info, making login/reset difficult.

3/ Limited access: In-person cancellations could only be done with one specific employee, often during limited hours when customers were at work.

4/ Mail obstacles: LA Fitness told members to send cancellation forms by certified/registered mail, adding cost and friction, without clearly informing them simpler written requests were valid.

5/ Opaque add-ons: Customers weren’t told they could cancel extra services (like towel service) separately, with any employee.

6/ Stonewalling: Staff were trained to reject phone/email cancellation attempts and escalate denials instead of helping.

Sending letters in 2025 to cancel? Give me a break. 

If a key part of your retention strategy is making it nearly impossible to cancel, you’re not retaining customers, you’re taking hostages as a service. 

there’s no room for tactics like this in the subscription economy. 

If these are allegations are true, La fitness: may your protein powder always clump in lukewarm water

$100 = $800

Here's how:

A subscriber's credit card fails for $100. They churn. 

If LTV is normally 8 months, then all future rebills are also lost. 

Month 1: $100 - FAILED 
Month 2: $100 - LOST
Month 3: $100 - LOST
Month 4: $100 - LOST
Month 5: $100 - LOST
Month 6: $100 - LOST
Month 7: $100 - LOST
Month 8: $100 - LOST

= $800 in lost revenue

All from a single $100 credit card failure

If I were a startup in 2025, here’s how I’d slash my churn rate in 1 week

After reviewing 100+ Stripe dashboards for churn, these are the 5 fastest-moving levers with the highest ROI.

(Bookmark this for when you need it)
__ 

1/ Track failed payments like future lost revenue

I’d treat every failed charge as future subscription revenue that’s slipping away. One $100 failure could mean $800 in lost LTV. Start measuring failure volume weekly and understand how it compounds 

__

2/ Extend and space out retry attempts

Stripe’s retries alone are limited. Because its engine’s logic was built on massive, generalized datasets, it’s designed to perform well on average, not for your specific customer dataset. Stretch the retry window to 3 to 4 weeks. Space attempts to line up with paydays or user activity. You’ll recover more without needing extra tools.

__

3/ Rewrite failed payment emails

Stripe’s default emails aren’t enough. Write your own. Keep it simple. Use kind and engaging language. Add a clear fix button. Send more than one reminder. Most people don’t update on the first email.

__

4/ Enable card updater tools

Visa and Mastercard offer auto-updating for expired cards, but you have to turn it on through your processor. Check if it's active. This can prevent failures before they happen.

__

5/ Have a backup plan after retries fail

Don’t let failed payments be the end. Offer customers downgrade or pause options, a reactivation offer, or even a discounted annual plan after a few failed attempts. It won’t always work, but a small recovery rate still adds up over time.


That’s what I’d do if I were starting from zero. Anything you found surprising? Or that you’d add to the list? Let me know

Taplio

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