Holdfast

So i’ve been deep in stripe dunning data for the past few months building holdfast, and here’s what surprised me most: most founders think churn = someone hit cancel. but a huge chunk of it is silent — a card expires, a bank flags the charge, stripe retries a couple times on its default schedule, then gives up. no email, no drama. the customer just… stops being a customer, and usually doesn’t even notice for weeks.

a few things i learned digging into this:

• stripe’s default retry logic is not built to maximize recovery, it’s built to be a safe default. most failed charges get like 3-4 retries over a fixed window with generic timing, regardless of the failure reason

• soft declines (insufficient funds, temporary bank issues) recover a lot better with retries timed around pay cycles than with a fixed schedule

• hard declines (expired card, stolen card flags) need a completely different approach — retrying does nothing, you need to get the customer to update their card, fast, before they forget you exist

• nobody tells the customer their payment failed unless you set that up yourself. so you’re losing revenue and the customer doesn’t even know it’s their fault

this is the exact problem holdfast is built around — smarter retry timing based on decline reason, plus automated emails that actually get people to update their card instead of generic “your payment failed” templates that go straight to spam-brain.

curious if others here have looked at their failed payment data — even a rough estimate of how much MRR is sitting in “failed but not yet churned” limbo. for most saas businesses it’s bigger than people expect.

Hey IH,

I just launched the waitlist for Holdfast — a tool that automatically recovers failed SaaS payments through smart retries and dunning email sequences.

The problem: 2–5% of subscription payments fail every month. Most go unrecovered — not because recovery is hard, but because nobody sets it up.

At $50k MRR, that's $18k/year walking out the door. A proper dunning setup recovers ~62% of it.

Holdfast connects to your payment processor and handles everything automatically. No sequences to configure, no dashboard to babysit.

Still in early build. If failed payments are a problem you deal with, I'd love your feedback.

👉 tryholdfast.app