Who this applies to
The setting covers subscriptions billed from your own Stripe account. That's where Ghost puts paid members, where the WordPress membership plugins on Stripe (Paid Memberships Pro, MemberPress, Restrict Content Pro) create subscriptions, and where your own Stripe Checkout or Payment Links do. Circle's paywalls bill from a Stripe account Circle creates for your community, which has the same setting. Platforms that run their own billing, such as Memberful or Patreon, handle failed payments themselves, and Substack sends its own failed-payment email.
Turning it on
- In the Stripe Dashboard, go to Settings, then Billing, then Subscriptions and emails. The email options are under Email notifications and customer management.
- Turn on Send emails when card payments fail. Stripe's docs list it with the revenue recovery settings, so if you don't see it there, search the Dashboard for its name.
- Choose where the email's link goes: a Stripe-hosted page, or your own page for updating a card. One choice covers all of Stripe's customer emails.
- In Branding settings, set your icon, brand color and accent color. Emails use the icon and both colors; they don't use the wider logo.
- While you're there, consider Send emails about expiring cards. It goes out a month before the card on file expires, which heads off a common failure before it happens.
To see what your readers will get, note that Stripe doesn't send customer emails in a sandbox, except to addresses on your verified email domain or belonging to a member of your Stripe team. Once it's live, the Customers page keeps a log of the emails sent in the last 60 days. It updates daily, so today's emails show up tomorrow.
What the email does
Stripe sends it after each failed payment. It tells the subscriber their recent subscription payment failed and links to a page where they can update their payment method. On Stripe's hosted page they can also pay the open invoice there and then; otherwise the new card is used on the next retry.
The link stops working once the subscription is canceled or marked unpaid, or the current renewal period has ended.
What it doesn't do
It comes from stripe.com unless you set up your own domain
By default Stripe sends invoices, receipts and failed-payment emails from the stripe.com domain. To send from your own, add the domain in the customer email settings and publish the DNS records Stripe gives you: a TXT record to prove ownership, and CNAME records for the sending domain and DKIM. You also need a DMARC policy, and verification can take up to 72 hours. It's worth doing. A note about your publication from a payment processor's address reads like a receipt, and receipts get skimmed.
Its timing is your retry schedule
Because the email follows each failed attempt, Stripe's retries decide when your reader hears about it. Smart Retries spreads its attempts over a period you choose, from a week to two months, and Stripe recommends 8 tries within 2 weeks. A custom schedule allows up to three retries. You don't set a reminder cadence of its own.
Two cases need a person to act, whatever the schedule:
- Hard declines, such as a lost or stolen card or an incorrect number. Stripe doesn't execute a retry on these until the customer adds a new payment method.
- The end of the schedule. After the final attempt, Stripe makes no further attempts, and the subscription is canceled, marked unpaid, left past due or paused, depending on your settings. On the recommended default, that's two weeks after the first failure.
Stripe writes the words
Branding changes the icon and colors. We found nothing in Stripe's docs for changing what the email says. So it can't speak in your voice, remind the reader what they get from you, or offer a cheaper plan to someone whose budget changed. It is a notice, not a note.
Should you turn it on?
If nothing else emails your subscribers when a card fails, yes, today. One email from Stripe beats silence, and most members whose card fails never meant to leave.
If something else already emails them, decide whether they should hear from both. On Ghost, Outpost's base plan includes failed-payment emails. You can also write your own: our email templates are a starting point, and why payments fail explains which failures a reminder can fix.
Creator Dunning emails the subscriber in your name, with replies coming to you, the day a renewal fails, then every three days for 30 days, and stops when they pay. You can keep Stripe's email on alongside it, or switch Stripe's off so your readers hear from you and nobody else.