Pieter Levels' Stripe recovery rate is 20%. Industry average is 40%. What's yours?

A few months ago, Pieter Levels tweeted about Photo AI's Stripe backend.

He asked ChatGPT: "How do I make more money?" It told him: your payment recovery rate is 20%. Industry average is 40%. You're leaving money on the table.

He spent a few hours writing a webhook to chase invoice.payment_failed events — then said he'd "report results" — and never updated the thread.

I've been thinking about this because Pieter is rare. Most Micro SaaS founders have no idea what their recovery rate is.

I searched Indie Hackers. Found:

• Someone asking "is there a service for recovering Stripe failed payments?" — their KeywordSearch.com keeps getting failed payments and they don't want to build it themselves
• Someone asking "SaaS owners, do you see a lot of failed payments?" — getting hit with Stripe "insufficient funds" notifications even on $8/month plans
• The BillingEngine founder writing about how $12,000 in failed payments sat in his previous SaaS account for FOUR MONTHS before he noticed

Same problem. Everyone's just quietly losing money.

The math

• Average SaaS loses 9% of annual revenue to failed payments (PYMNTS, 2023)
• 20-40% of subscription churn is involuntary — customers who wanted to stay, their card just got declined
• A proper dunning sequence recovers 30-70% of that

For a $10K MRR product: $10,800/year disappearing silently.

These customers didn't choose to cancel. They just never got an email.

What I built

RecoverKit — automated failed payment recovery for Micro SaaS founders.

Connect your Stripe account (OAuth, 2 minutes) -> auto-sends Day 1 / Day 3 / Day 7 recovery emails when invoices fail -> stops the moment payment succeeds -> Dashboard shows exactly how much you've recovered.

No code. No Zapier. No maintenance.

Live beta: https://tryrecoverkit.com/connect

I'm looking for beta users

First 20 people who connect their Stripe account get 3 months free.

Only ask: if you see a recovery (or don't), tell me the number. Help me validate whether this actually works.

Three questions for the community

1. How do you currently handle failed payments?
   A) Stripe auto-retry only, nothing added
   B) Manually check the dashboard
   C) Using a dunning tool (which one?)
   D) Honestly, my customer tells me before I know

2. Do you know your Stripe recovery rate?
   Yes (how much?) / No, but I would like to / Never thought about it

3. $29/month for automated dunning + ROI dashboard — your first reaction?
   Too expensive for my current stage / Reasonable, I would try it / I would pay more for a proven recovery rate

See you in the comments. If you'd spend 15 minutes telling me about your failed payment experience, I'd really appreciate it — I'll post the aggregate results back to the community.

Building RecoverKit — automated Stripe failed payment recovery for Micro SaaS. Building in public. Will share results here regardless of outcome.