Payment recovery, defined.

Dunning

Dunning is the process of following up on a failed payment until it's collected — retries, card-update reminders, and a decision point if none of it works. On Stripe, dunning starts the moment an invoice comes back declined. See the full Stripe dunning guide.

Involuntary churn

Involuntary churn is a customer lost because a payment failed — an expired card, a bank decline — not because they chose to leave. It's the churn dunning is meant to prevent. See the churn guide for the numbers behind it.

Voluntary churn

Voluntary churn is a customer who cancels on purpose: price, a missing feature, or no longer needing the product. The fix looks different from involuntary churn — exit surveys, save offers, and win-back rather than payment retries.

Win-back

A win-back is an offer sent to a customer after they've already canceled, aiming to bring them back — typically a discount on their previous plan, sent within a window of days to a couple of weeks after the cancellation. See Win-back emails that recover canceled Stripe customers.

Smart Retries

Smart Retries is a Stripe Billing feature that automatically retries a failed invoice on a schedule Stripe optimizes from card network data. It's a native Stripe capability, not a third-party add-on — a real baseline worth turning on before layering any dunning sequence on top.

MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)

MRR is the predictable revenue a subscription business collects every month from active subscriptions. Losing a customer to churn — voluntary or involuntary — reduces MRR directly, which is why "MRR churn" (revenue lost, not just customers lost) is often tracked alongside the customer-count churn rate.

Churn rate

Churn rate is the share of customers (or revenue) lost over a given period: (customers lost ÷ customers at the start of the period) × 100. See the formula and industry benchmarks in the churn guide.