Third-party churn tools will never be as good as platform-native churn tools.
That’s the conclusion I keep circling back to.
There’s a small but growing ecosystem of “platform-agnostic” dunning tools. They plug directly into your Stripe dashboard and try to recover failed payments. Some even add retention flows like “pause instead of cancel” or “custom cancellation reasons.”
But I’m not convinced they actually work.
- They’ll never go as deep as the tools built into the platform you’re running your business on.
- They’ll never understand the nuances of membership logic, level changes, or content gating the way we do.
- They’ll always feel like a bolt-on instead of an operating system.
- Worst, they’ll freak your customers out with hijacked UI or different looking emails that feel like phishing.
For a long time, churn wasn’t our focus. We’ve been building Paid Memberships Pro since 2011. Many of our customers have been running their membership sites nearly as long. The advice I gave back then still stands: don’t obsess over churn in your first year: obsess over getting members.
But now? It’s later. For us and for our customers.
Renewals make up over 60% of our day-to-day income. Which means, on any given day, we have $10k–$20k in potentially churning revenue sitting out there, relying on a card update, a retry, or an email nudge.
That’s too big to ignore for ourselves and the 7- to 8-figure businesses built on our platform.
So we’re starting to look at churn the same way we looked at abandoned carts, international payment gateways, and easy-to-create user fields
Do we need a “past due” status in PMPro itself?
Should failed payment retries be logged natively, not via lookups in email logs or by tracking webhook and IPN events?
How do we make failed payment flows both flexible and sane (after the third email, they’re either not getting your emails or just not interested)?
Nobody wants 14 emails in 3 weeks.
Can we design native win-back tools as part of membership logic, not afterthoughts?
Some third-party tools say they will solve churn for you. What I’ve seen in my tests if that they more often confuse customers.
Slightly off brand emails from an unrecognized email address. They look spammy, not authentic. We tried these tools. Customers forwarded the emails and awkward content to us… “This looks off? This company impersonating you! Is this safe?”
That was a fast cancel for me, because it’s just not us. Relationships are everything. And we’ve always said: your data, your payments, your members = your business.
But that also means churn prevention is our responsibility to build, and your responsibility to run. Together.
It’s funny… 15 years in, we’re back at the same place as so many of our customers: Looking at our renewal pipeline and saying, “Okay. Time to get serious about churn.”
