Works alongside
Plus Shopify. No migration, no checkout changes.
Stay.ai’s Smart Dunning retries on rules keyed to the failure reason, and its declined-payment emails go out on schedule. MaxLTV runs the whole recovery on top of Stay.ai as one integrated system: decline-aware retries, personalized email and SMS, the storefront prompt, subscriber-level churn prediction and reporting your finance team can audit. Stay.ai keeps managing the subscriptions.
Works alongside
Plus Shopify. No migration, no checkout changes.
When a Stay.ai subscription billing attempt fails, the subscription enters dunning and is retried at the cadence in your Billing Settings, or on the schedule Smart Dunning applies by error type. Each failure is logged in the Billing Failures report and tracked as a Recovery ID in the Payment Recovery dashboard until the subscription recovers or is cancelled. Stay.ai sends payment-declined emails from its own email system, with Klaviyo, Attentive and Postscript available for more, and Shopify sends its payment-update email with a link to fix the card. Once the maximum number of retries is reached, the subscription is cancelled automatically.
The native behaviour, as documented by Stay.ai. Worth knowing exactly, because it is the floor you are building on.
Stay.ai does not process the charge itself; billing goes through your Shopify payment processor. Stay.ai controls when subscriptions rebill each day, how often failed payments are retried and how many times, and how out-of-stock items are handled.
With Smart Dunning on, Stay.ai sets the retry timing from rules keyed to the failure reason instead of a fixed interval, and supports holding messages back during the early retries. Stay.ai’s own case study reports a 7 percent lift in payment recovery for the brands that turned it on.
Every failed attempt is logged in the Billing Failures report with the error code and message, and tracked as a Recovery ID in the Payment Recovery dashboard until the subscription recovers or is cancelled.
Stay.ai sends payment-declined emails through its own email system, and can trigger Klaviyo, Attentive and Postscript. Shopify also sends its payment-update email with a secure link; customers can update the card there, in the portal, or through Shop Pay.
None of this is a flaw in Stay.ai. Retry logic and scheduled notifications are billing features. Recovery is also a customer-behaviour problem, and even the retry itself works better when it is placed per decline, which needs a different set of tools.
Stay.ai keeps managing the subscriptions. MaxLTV takes over recovery: the retries and every message around them, in one system.
A subscriber with an open failure sees a banner or notification the moment they land on your store, which is where many of them go instead of reading email.
Email and SMS split by failure reason and triggered by what the subscriber does, not only by the retry schedule. Sent from your own verified domain, with an exit check before every send so a recovered customer never gets another reminder.
Every message and prompt links straight to a secure payment-update flow. No password reset, no account page, no hunting for the subscription.
Every decline is classified and the retry placed when that card is most likely to authorize, with backup payment methods on file tried when the primary card is dead. Hard declines, including expired cards and emptied Shop Pay wallets, go straight to the card-update path because no retry will clear them.
Churn risk scored per subscriber daily, so intervention can start before the first failure, and recovery rate reported the way finance can audit it: retries alone versus card updates, by failure reason and by cohort.
MaxLTV is a managed engagement. The sequences, prompts and thresholds are set up and tuned by people who do this for subscription brands, not left as a template.
| Recovery lever | Stay.ai alone | With MaxLTV |
|---|---|---|
| Retry timing | Rules-based: Billing Settings cadence, or Smart Dunning rules by error type | AI-driven: each retry placed by decline code for when the card is most likely to authorize, with backup payment methods on file and reduced-amount retries after repeated declines |
| Card update incentives | None | Incentives for updating the card, coordinated with the emails and the retry schedule |
| Customer messaging | Stay.ai declined-payment emails; Klaviyo, Attentive, Postscript | Personalized email and SMS split by failure reason, with exit checks before every send |
| Trigger for messaging | Billing event | Adds behaviour triggers: store visit, email engagement, risk score |
| On-site prompt for an open failure | None | Banner or notification on the next visit |
| Churn prediction before the failure | Not part of Smart Dunning | Per-subscriber risk score, daily |
| Recovery reporting | Payment Recovery dashboard, Billing Failures report | Adds the split: retries alone vs card updates, by reason and cohort |
Bonafide moved its dunning to MaxLTV in December 2025. Recovery more than doubled, from about 24% of failed payments to roughly 55%, for a $2M annual LTV impact. The levers are the same on Stay.ai.
A managed rollout, in stages, with no migration off Stay.ai and no checkout changes.
We start with your Stay.ai failure data: which reasons fail, what recovers on retries, what needs a card update, and what that is worth.
MaxLTV installs as a Shopify app and connects to your Stay.ai store. Subscriptions, products and checkout stay in Stay.ai.
Failure reasons map to retry rules, sequences and prompts. MaxLTV takes over from Stay.ai’s dunning, so a failed charge is only ever retried and messaged by one system.
Flows go live in stages and recovery is reported split by retries versus card updates, so you can see what changed against Stay.ai’s native recovery.
For recovery, yes. MaxLTV takes over retry timing and subscriber messaging as one integrated system: decline-aware retries, personalized email and SMS, the storefront prompt for subscribers with an open failure, per-subscriber churn prediction and recovery reporting split by retries versus card updates. Stay.ai keeps managing the subscriptions themselves.
Scheduled emails reach the customers who read them that day. A storefront prompt and a sequence split by failure reason, with exit checks before every send, reach the ones who did not, and finish before the subscription is cancelled for repeated failures.
From Shopify’s subscription billing data and the error codes Stay.ai records. MaxLTV sends the messages itself, from your own verified domain. Nothing moves off Stay.ai.
Yes. Error code drives both the retry and the message: soft declines are retried when the card is most likely to authorize, and hard declines go straight to the card-update path.
Two models: a managed engagement, or a performance partnership priced on recovered revenue. Pricing has the details, and the free churn audit shows what recovery is worth on your numbers before you commit.
Bring your Stay.ai failed-payment export to the free churn audit. We will show you which failures are recoverable, what they are worth, and what to fix first.
Background reading: dunning best practices, recovery rate and decline codes and the payment recovery overview. Also for Recharge and Skio.
