Building recurflux made me realize how many SaaS founders cannot explain their own churn

most founders i talk to know their churn rate. it's on the dashboard. usually somewhere between 3-7% monthly.

but when i ask them to break it down, things get fuzzy fast.

the conversation usually goes like this:
me: "what's your churn rate?"
them: "around 5%"
me: "how much of that is voluntary vs involuntary?"
them: "uh... what's the difference?"

this happens more than you'd think.

voluntary vs involuntary churn
voluntary churn = customer actively cancels because they don't want your product anymore

involuntary churn = customer wants to stay but gets churned due to failed payments (expired cards, insufficient funds, payment errors)

about 30% of all churn is involuntary. that means if you're looking at a 5% churn rate, roughly 1.5% of your customers didn't mean to leave at all.

why this matters
when you lump them together, you're trying to solve two completely different problems with the same solution.

voluntary churn needs: better onboarding, feature improvements, customer success, value demonstration

involuntary churn needs: smart payment retries, card updaters, dunning sequences, pre-debit notifications

most founders are spending time on product improvements and customer interviews trying to reduce churn, while 30-40% of their lost revenue is just... payment infrastructure failing quietly in the background.

what i've seen so far
talked to a founder last week doing $50k MRR with 6% monthly churn. when we broke it down:

4% voluntary (product/value issues)

2% involuntary (failed payments)

they were spending all their retention effort on feature requests and customer calls. zero effort on payment recovery. that 2% involuntary churn was costing them ~$12k/year in completely recoverable revenue.

stripe retries failed payments automatically, but the default recovery rate is usually 40-60% at best. the other 40-60% just... disappears.

the test
if you're a SaaS founder, try this:

open your payment dashboard (stripe, paddle, razorpay, whatever)

check how many failed payments you had last month

check how many of those were successfully recovered

multiply the unrecovered amount by 12

that number is what you're losing annually to involuntary churn alone.

most founders i show this to had no idea the number was that high.

if you want to see the actual breakdown for your SaaS, i built a free tool that splits your churn into voluntary vs involuntary: https://recurflux.com/resources/churn-splitter

takes about 2 minutes. just connect your payment processor and it'll show you exactly how much is recoverable.

anyone else tracking this? or did you only realize involuntary churn was a thing when you saw the actual revenue leaking?