JakeVacovec

We built FlyCode after seeing subscription businesses lose ~35% of recurring revenue each year to failed payments — even when customers had other valid cards on file.

*The problem:* When a customer's primary card fails, Stripe retries a few times then cancels the subscription. If that customer has a backup card, it isn’t tried. At least 20% of active customers have more than one card on file, which means a lot of preventable churn.

*Our solution:* FlyCode automatically identifies if a customer has other valid cards on file and retries them when a subscription payment fails. You can configure when these retries happen during the dunning period (beginning, middle, end) and define validity rules (e.g. “card was used in last 180 days”). It’s a Stripe app — no code changes needed.

We've seen 18%-20% higher recovery rates from our core retry engine, plus another 5–10% from using backup cards. Importantly, there was no increase in refunds or chargebacks — in fact, rates were lower than merchant averages. Big companies like Microsoft and Amazon already do this internally; we wanted to make the same capability accessible to smaller SaaS teams.

*Under the hood:* FlyCode monitors for failed invoices, checks for available backup methods via Stripe’s PaymentMethod API, and systematically retries in a way that avoids service disruption or manual workflows.

We’re Jake, Etai, and Tzachi — we previously built payment recovery systems at startups and enterprises, which is how we discovered this gap.

You can try it here: [https://www.flycode.com/stripe]

We’d love feedback from anyone dealing with subscription payment failures. What’s been your experience with involuntary churn? Have you considered leveraging backup payment methods?

Hi HN community, we are Jake, Tzachi and Etai, co-founders of FlyCode (https://www.flycode.com). FlyCode makes it easy for subscription-based companies to recover lost revenue due to failed payments and involuntary churn - a major hidden revenue killer for b2b & b2c SaaS merchants and dtc subscription brands.

In previous roles, we led payments teams at enterprises and startups, where we built payment recovery processes and optimized billing systems. We experienced firsthand how challenging it is to recover failed payments efficiently.

Many teams we’ve spoken to view failed payments as an unsolvable black box — a cost of doing business. But when a payment fails, it doesn’t just cost immediate revenue; it significantly impacts the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) and customer experience.

Teams are trying to handle it by (1) relying on the basic recovery of their payment provider (like Stripe basic smart recovery); (2) brute forcing or fixed-interval retry strategies, a legacy approach that ultimately reduces retry success rates and increases customer churn (3) sending too many or too few emails to customers (contact your bank..).

One of the biggest challenges is that payment providers, issuing banks, and card networks classify errors into different categories and have their own risk rules, which adds complexity and leads to many errors getting bucketed together, such as ‘Do not honor’.

To address this problem, we built decisioning models that take into account 100’s of datapoints, such as customer and payment metadata as well as internal classifiers of error codes and messages. The models determine the optimal time to retry a payment with current or backup payment methods and when to communicate with a customer. Our communications product coordinates transactional emails/sms with retries ensuring sent at an ideal local time and in the local language. With FlyCode you can recover more payments with (1) fewer payment retries (2) faster average days to recovery (3) less customer communications (4) compliant with the Card networks rules [we partnered with Visa] (5) and coordinate the communications with the retries automatically for each customer. On top of that, solutions like Card Account Updater (CAU) and Network Tokens help to automatically update card details when a new card is activated or an expired one is replaced.

Our 60+ customers range from mid-sized to large businesses. We built apps in Stripe and Shopify https://marketplace.stripe.com/apps/flycode-payments (featured in Stripe’s marketplace). Please let me know if you have more questions or feedback. We’ll do our best to answer them!