I found a $250/month problem that bootstrapped and Solo founders can't afford to fix. So I built the $19 version.

I'm going to share something that changed how I think about SaaS economics. And then I'm going to tell you what I did about it.

A few months ago I was digging through Stripe data for a client project and stumbled on a tab I'd never really looked at before: Payments → Status: Failed.

The number was ugly.

About 8% of their monthly billings charges that were attempted and rejected. Not customers who cancelled. Not people who were unhappy with the product. Cards that expired. Banks that flagged a charge. Customers who hit a spending limit on billing day.

I started asking other SaaS founders if they'd ever checked this tab. Almost nobody had. And when they did, the reaction was always some version of: "Wait... this has been happening every month?"

So I went down the rabbit hole. Pulled benchmarks. Read every piece of research I could find. Here's what the data says:

Recurly studied 1,200 subscription businesses and found that roughly 13% of recurring transactions get declined each month on average. For B2B SaaS specifically, over half of total churn is involuntary payment failures, not cancellations. Stripe says 25% of lapsed subscriptions are purely due to payment issues, and recovered subscriptions continue for an average of 7 more months.

The math got my attention. If you're at $20K MRR and roughly 13% of charges fail monthly, that's about $2,600/month in failed billings. Stripe's Smart Retries recover some of that they use ML trained on billions of transactions to pick optimal retry timing. But Smart Retries only handle the charge reattempt. They don't email the customer. They don't warn anyone about an expiring card. They don't create urgency or deadlines.

The gap between what Stripe recovers automatically and what a proper dunning system recovers is real money.

So naturally, I looked at the tools that fix this.

Churnkey: starts at $250/month. Churn Buster: starts at $249/month. Baremetrics Recover: $129/month add-on on top of a $75+ base subscription. Stunning: $50–120/month depending on MRR.

These are legitimate, battle-tested products. Churn Buster has been around since 2013 and has saved companies like ButcherBox over $100M. Churnkey's ML retries are sophisticated. I'm not going to pretend they're bad.

But their pricing is built for companies at $100K+ MRR. The minimum buy in acts as a natural filter. If $250/month is painful for you, you're probably not their target customer.

And that's the problem. Because the founders doing $8K–$30K MRR are the bootstrapped operators trying to get to ramen profitability and they lose the same percentage of revenue to failed payments as the big players. They just can't afford the fix. So they do nothing. And they bleed 5–12% of billings every month while focusing entirely on acquisition.

I kept thinking about this gap. Expensive problem. Overpriced solutions. Massive underserved segment. That's usually where interesting businesses get built.

So I built SaveMRR.

What it actually does

Six recovery engines, all running on top of Stripe's existing infrastructure:

A free Revenue Scan that connects to Stripe via a restricted API key (read-only for the scan, AES-256 encrypted, no access to payouts or bank data) and shows the exact dollar amount a founder is losing to failed payments, cancellations, and downgrades. Results in 60 seconds. No account needed. This is the entire sales motion and it shows someone the bleeding and then offers the bandage.

Automated dunning emails of SaveMRR are plain text, from the founder's own domain, with one click card update links via Stripe's Customer Portal deep links. Different handling based on decline codes (an insufficient_funds gets retried; an expired_card skips retries and goes straight to "update your card"). The emails are very simple. No logos, no HTML templates. They read like a note from a person, not a billing platform.

Pre-churn detection monitors cards expiring within 30 days and auto-sends update reminders before the charge ever fails. This is the highest ROI action in the entire system because it prevents the failure from happening at all.

Cancel flow interception is exit survey + smart offer matching. "Too expensive" gets a discount, "not using it" gets a pause option. Applied directly in Stripe.

Win-back automation re-engages churned customers over 60 days with escalating offers and one click reactivation via Stripe Checkout.

Onboarding sequences - welcome, nudge, feature highlight, check-in over the first week.

All six engines. $19/month on the Starter plan. $49 for Growth. $99 for Scale. Flat fee. No revenue share. No percentage of recovered revenue.

The brutally honest current state

This is early. Very early. I launched as a Day 1 alpha. I have no proprietary recovery benchmarks from my own customer base every stat on the site is an industry figure with the source cited. I have no case studies. I have no ButcherBox saving $100M.

The product works. The Revenue Scan returns real data from real Stripe accounts. The engines fire. The emails go out. The card update links land customers on Stripe's hosted portal. The system is live.

What I don't have is proof at scale. And in a space where trust is everything you're asking founders to connect their Stripe account to a tool from someone they've never heard of that's a real problem.

The 2x guarantee helps (full refund if SaveMRR doesn't recover at least 2x the plan cost in 30 days). The restricted API key approach helps (we literally cannot access payouts, transfers, or bank details). But "helps" and "enough" are different things.

Why I'm posting this here

Indie Hackers is where I've spent the most time learning how other founders build. The transparency culture here is the whole reason I'm comfortable posting my current numbers (which are small) instead of pretending I'm further along.

I'm looking for three things:

First, honest feedback. If you look at savemrr.co and something feels off the copy, the pricing, the trust signals, the feature set and I want to hear it. Not the polite version. The real version.

Second, beta users. If you're running a SaaS on Stripe and doing any amount of MRR, the Revenue Scan is free. It takes 60 seconds. If the number it shows you is interesting, try the tool for a month. We offer the first $200 MRR saved for free. The 2x guarantee means there's literally no financial risk.

Third, perspective from founders who've dealt with this. Do you track your involuntary churn rate? Have you tried any dunning tool? Did you build something yourself? What worked? What didn't?

The URL is savemrr.co. Happy to answer anything about the product, the market, the competitive landscape, the technical architecture, or why I decided to build a dunning tool in 2026 instead.