Hey IH,
I’ve been building Restryde for the past few months. It’s an automated payment recovery tool for subscription businesses using Stripe, with plans to expand to other payment platforms over time based on what the community actually wants next.
When a customer’s payment fails, it detects it immediately and retries based on why it failed. AI-personalised recovery emails are available on the higher tiers. The entry tier runs on solid template emails, no AI, to keep it affordable at the moment. Right now the AI only handles email content, it doesn’t decide the retry logic itself. That’s something I already know I want to build next, having it choose smarter timing and approach per customer, not just write the email.
Built entirely solo, using Claude Code as my primary dev tool. I’m not a professional developer, though I’m not starting from zero either. I taught myself to code a little and have built a few prototypes over the years (games and tools). This has still been a genuinely steep learning curve, just not a completely blind one.
I needed something I could build and run entirely remotely, on my own terms, for reasons that matter a lot to me personally. Something I knew I was capable of building, but also genuinely new ground, especially the marketing side. Those skills are expensive and time-consuming to learn properly when you also need to earn an income, so I’ve never had the chance to learn them professionally. This project is partly that too, a real portfolio to actually prove I can do this, not just claim it.
I used AI to help think it through properly, market research, technical approach, all of it. Failed payments kept coming up as a real, ongoing problem for small subscription businesses. The tools that already existed (Churn Buster, Churnkey) were built for companies already doing serious volume, not the business just starting out. A few smaller, similarly-focused tools exist too, but the space still felt worth building into properly. So that’s what I set out to build instead.
It’s live now, in public beta, at $10/month. For IndieHackers specifically: comment or DM me and I’ll send you a one-time code for a free first month. Limited to the first 20 people, genuinely just keeping costs manageable on my end right now.
Your second month also comes with a founders membership and the recovery guarantee, if it doesn’t recover at least double your subscription cost ($20) that month, you’re not charged for it either. The moment recovered value crosses $20, you pay the normal $10 for that month.
If you run a subscription business on Stripe, even a small one, I’d genuinely value having you try it and tell me what’s broken, confusing, or missing. If you have a minute to look at the landing page itself and tell me what you think of it, that’d help just as much.
This is my first time posting here, I’d like real feedback from real genuine people I’ll leave my email below, thank you for your time.
email: [email protected]
The hardest part for products like this is usually not building the tool — it's making the value obvious to someone seeing it for the first time.
A founder understands every feature because they lived through the problem and the build process. A new visitor has none of that context. They are trying to answer one thing:
"Will this actually make my life easier?"
The strongest landing pages usually don't start with what the product does. They start with the frustrating moment that made someone search for a solution in the first place.
The clearer that connection becomes, the less work you have to do convincing people.
A good product can get attention. A clear message is what turns that attention into users.
What a brilliant idea! Good luck!
Thank you very much. Highly appreciated!
The pricing feels approachable for small businesses, and the guarantee is a nice confidence booster. Collecting feedback from early users before expanding features is a sensible strategy. Hope you find your first 20 testers quickly.
Thank you for the kind words and feedback, I designed this app with small businesses in mind. This app is a big opportunity for me, so I wanted to build something that’s genuinely useful and affordable for the people who help make it a reality!
This sounds like a useful solution, especially for smaller subscription businesses that may not need or be able to afford the more established tools. I also like that you’ve been clear about what the AI does right now instead of presenting it as something more advanced than it is. The recovery guarantee is an interesting approach too—it lowers the risk for early users. Curious to see what feedback you get during the beta.
Thanks heaps, this honestly means a lot. Being upfront about the AI was important to me, I’d rather earn trust by being open than oversell it.
Also, keeping it affordable for smaller businesses was always intentional, I want my tool to be built with them in mind.
I’m really excited to see what the beta feedback brings.
Congrats on shipping and going public with this — solo, self-taught, and honest about what's AI vs. not is a hard combination to pull off well, and you did.
One thing I'd push on: the recovery guarantee is a great trust signal, but I'd think hard about how you're calculating "recovered value" per customer. If a payment would've eventually succeeded on its own (some soft declines resolve themselves within a few days regardless of what you do), attributing that recovery to Restryde could quietly overstate your win rate and undercut the guarantee's credibility later. Worth having a clean definition of "would not have recovered without intervention" before you're explaining edge cases to annoyed customers.
On the AI-personalized email tier vs. template tier — that's a smart way to segment without overbuilding. When you do get to smarter retry timing, the biggest lever is usually less about AI cleverness and more about matching retries to real-world cash flow patterns (paydays, typical billing cycles) rather than a fixed backoff schedule. That's where a lot of the "why did this retry fail again" frustration comes from in tools built for bigger companies — they optimize for volume, not for a customer who genuinely gets paid on the 1st and 15th.
Landing page reads clearly, by the way — the pricing and guarantee structure is easy to understand at a glance, which is not nothing at this stage. Good luck with the first 20.
Thanks so much for taking the time to write this out. This is perfect and very helpful.
The point about recovered value really got me thinking. You’re right, if a payment would have fixed itself in a few days anyway, I shouldn’t count that as something Restryde did. I’ve been thinking about this since I read your comment. I think I need a clear way to tell the difference between “we actually fixed this” and “this would have worked out on its own.” I should try to sort something out now rather than try to explain it later to a customer who’s annoyed.
The retry timing point was a good one too. honestly i have done a bit of thought about how to approach it and have done a bit of work on it so far. I’ve been trying to match them to real pay schedules and also have it detect which days it recovers more successfully and schedule using the both as a guide.
Really glad to hear the landing page reads well. That page has been redone more times than I’d like to admit, so hearing that made my day.
Thanks again, and thanks for the kind words at the end too. It means a lot to me!.
Wanted to come back and thank you again, and be open about something with everyone here too.
After I read your comment the first time, I sat with it and actually went and investigated the points you raised properly. A lot of what you mentioned was already in the works, but one thing stood out that I hadn’t thought to check: what happens when a payment recovers on its own, without the app doing anything?
Turns out that exposed a real bug. Restryde would keep sending recovery emails to a customer who had already paid, pushing someone who didn’t need pushing at all. Found it, and squashed it fast.
It also connects straight back to the attribution point you raised earlier, about not claiming credit for a recovery that wasn’t actually caused by the app. This bug was part of that same problem, and fixing it clears the way for building proper natural-vs-app-recovery separation, so the guarantee stays honest and the numbers actually mean what they say.
So genuinely, thank you. Your comment led directly to a real fix!
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This is an interesting one — failed payments are a very clear, high-value pain.
Tools in this space usually win when they tie directly to recovered revenue, not just “handling failures.”
The buyer here is often someone thinking in terms of % recovered, not features.
Feels like there’s an opportunity to lean heavily into that outcome in the positioning.
Curious — are you already tracking how much revenue users recover with it?
Happy to help shape this into something that sells itself — the underlying problem is very strong.
This is true, a lot of features doesn’t mean higher chance/percentage of recovery, that’s why I want to get the main fundamentals right first. Tracking the amount this app recovers is one of those things I couldn’t leave out.
it does display the important data on the dashboard but, It also has an in app analytics page (higher tiers have longer viewable timeframes), currently it tracks a number of things like total jobs count and total revenue recovered, but also has a recovery rate percentage and a graph to show percentage per day too. The time frames are 7 days 30 days and 90 days respectively. It also covers a few other things, if you want a full list I can provide more detail.
The 1 month beta test has access to full analytic page. (Lower tiers lock use of some analytic data)
I would definitely appreciate any help, feedback or suggestions to help shape this into a better product.
great do you have an email i can send you a report on?
That would be great thank you, I have linked an email in my original post. Reach out at anytime.
The recovery guarantee is interesting because it gives you a very concrete definition of value.
Have you had enough real failed payments run through Restryde yet to see whether “recover at least 2x the fee” is actually the threshold customers care about, or is that still a hypothesis you’re testing?
Good question and truthfully not quite yet, I’ve only really ran internal testing. So really it’s only a hypothesis and also one of the reasons why I am giving the guarantee. so if a user does happen to encounter a problem or even prolonged recoveries, their time and money is not spent either.
I want the app succeed in doing its job so the user also benefits from its use. So early discovery is definitely important, as well as valuable data and insight to how I can adjust the approach to customers to maximise chance of success, as well as minimise the time taken to actually recover.
I’ve been doing a bit of research and also questioning stripe users about their recovery approach and success rates to try to improve my next updates and feature implements.
I appreciate you being candid about that. The fact that the guarantee is doing a job before you have enough recovery data is actually what caught my attention.
I'd be interested in continuing the conversation by email if you're open to it. What's the best email to reach you on?
I would like to chat more about this, any feedback and help is always appreciated and warmly welcomed.
I couldn’t link my email address in the reply directly so I’ve added it to the original post.
Thanks! I’ve just sent it over.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts whenever you have a chance.
Failed payments being invisible until someone actually builds for it is such a common pattern with "boring but necessary" problems The double your-subscription cost guarantee is a clever way to remove the trial friction Rooting for this one.
Since you specifically asked for landing-page feedback, I checked it as a cold visitor. The hero is strong: the failed-payment problem is immediate and the dashboard makes the outcome tangible.
The point that stopped me was the billing rule. The page says “Join the Beta — $10/month,” then “you don’t pay a cent until it actually works.” This post adds a free first month and says month two is charged only after at least $20 is recovered. Those statements may all be true, but a visitor has to assemble the rule across two places.
I’d put three lines beside the CTA:
1. Connect Stripe.
2. First month free with the IH beta code.
3. After that, pay $10 only in months Restryde recovers at least $20.
Adjust that wording if I misunderstood the actual rule.
I’d also hide “0 of 100 founding member spots claimed” until the number becomes positive; right now it acts as anti-social proof. I wouldn’t redesign the hero—the problem, audience, and action are already clearer than most beta pages.
Really cool! Hope it goes well