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Launch HN: FlyCode (YC S22) – Stop losing revenue due to failed payments
Hi HN community, we are Jake, Tzachi and Etai, co-founders of FlyCode (https://www.flycode.com https://www.flycode.com). FlyCode makes it easy for subscription-based companies to recover lost revenue due to failed payments and involuntary churn - a major hidden revenue killer for b2b & b2c SaaS merchants and dtc subscription brands.
In previous roles, we led payments teams at enterprises and startups, where we built payment recovery processes and optimized billing systems. We experienced firsthand how challenging it is to recover failed payments efficiently.
Many teams we’ve spoken to view failed payments as an unsolvable black box — a cost of doing business. But when a payment fails, it doesn’t just cost immediate revenue; it significantly impacts the customer’s lifetime value (LTV) and customer experience.
Teams are trying to handle it by (1) relying on the basic recovery of their payment provider (like Stripe basic smart recovery); (2) brute forcing or fixed-interval retry strategies, a legacy approach that ultimately reduces retry success rates and increases customer churn (3) sending too many or too few emails to customers (contact your bank..).
One of the biggest challenges is that payment providers, issuing banks, and card networks classify errors into different categories and have their own risk rules, which adds complexity and leads to many errors getting bucketed together, such as ‘Do not honor’.
To address this problem, we built decisioning models that take into account 100’s of datapoints, such as customer and payment metadata as well as internal classifiers of error codes and messages. The models determine the optimal time to retry a payment with current or backup payment methods and when to communicate with a customer. Our communications product coordinates transactional emails/sms with retries ensuring sent at an ideal local time and in the local language. With FlyCode you can recover more payments with (1) fewer payment retries (2) faster average days to recovery (3) less customer communications (4) compliant with the Card networks rules [we partnered with Visa] (5) and coordinate the communications with the retries automatically for each customer. On top of that, solutions like Card Account Updater (CAU) and Network Tokens help to automatically update card details when a new card is activated or an expired one is replaced.
Our 60+ customers range from mid-sized to large businesses. We built apps in Stripe and Shopify https://marketplace.stripe.com/apps/flycode-payments https://marketplace.stripe.com/apps/flycode-payments (featured in Stripe’s marketplace). Please let me know if you have more questions or feedback. We’ll do our best to answer them!
- sparrish 2y agoGot anything for India's new rules against recurring charges? So many of our customers in India are having a very hard time paying us with credit cards because their banks no longer are allowed to accept subscription charges.
- TechDebtDevin 2y agoThis rule sounds crazy, do you have more info?
- sparrish 2y agohttps://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/new-recurring-mandate-rules-and-impact-on-subscription-models/ https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/blogs/voices/new-recurri... We've not seen much of an impact until the last couple of months when nearly all the charges for our customers in India have begun to fail. They're all below the $180 limit so I don't know what's going on.
- JakeVacovec 2y agoWe're happy to run an audit to see if there's a real opportunity to improve results for you.
- deskr 2y agoSadly the way the subscription system is abused, this doesn't sound crazy at all.
- devmor 2y agoThat's what I was thinking - it sounds welcome. I would love if every recurring charge I had required me to recieve a notification to approve it. I have spent my entire adult life attempting to avoid subscriptions and only use services I pro-actively pay for, which has become rather impossible over the last decade. Returning to that would be great! Of course, a large amount of SaaS companies would be very unhappy with this - recurring billing on customers who forget about the service is a major revenue source. There's an entire industry built around "not-quite-scamming" people in this way. Lately I've taken to using whatever credit card I have that is going to expire the soonest, or a virtual card, and then not updating it on customer portals. In many cases, this allows me to use a different card to make a "one time payment" after the recurring payment fails, which prompts me to evaluate whether or not the service is still something I need every month.