I recently noticed a major oversight in one of my projects involving Stripe. After a payment failure, automated emails were sent out, but the user ignored them—so did we. As a result, we lost $200 MRR without realizing. I'm considering creating a simple tool that listens for failed payments via webhook. This tool would wait 24 hours, and if the user hasn't taken action, it would send a Slack alert to someone on our team to follow up manually. It would be super straightforward with just a webhook and some basic logic, no OAuth or API keys required. I'm trying to figure out if this is just a problem my team faces or if it's something others struggle with too. Would you find this tool useful? Has anyone experienced a similar situation?
6 Answers
There are similar tools already out there. For example, Slack has a built-in integration for Stripe that does a lot of what you're proposing for free. Just saying, it might be better to check existing solutions first before you build.
While this problem is real, I worry you might not find a large enough market for this. Many developers don’t understand the complexities of payment processing. For smaller operations, understanding things like chargeback rates is crucial, and they might not see a tool like yours as a necessity until they face severe issues. It's definitely niche, and you'll need to gauge interest carefully.
I’m not sure if the user is still interested in your service if they ignored the payment failure emails. It sounds like they might not want what you’re selling if they didn’t react when the service stopped working. Maybe they just decided to stop paying?
True, but sometimes users miss emails for all sorts of reasons. Following up could help clarify their intentions and possibly convert them back.
This is a valid issue, but I doubt many bigger companies would want to share their churn rates with anyone else. They might only disclose data on failed payments without revealing too much.
Exactly, as long as you’re just tracking failed payments, I don’t think it’ll be an issue. Companies are usually more protective over broader payment data.
I think it's worth trying out. You might want to define how many users you'd expect to convert before heavily investing time into it. If it turns out to be a small group, it might not be sustainable, but it's still a shot worth taking.
It’s a decent idea, but honestly, I would just build something like this myself. It’d probably only take about an hour, tops.
Did you experience this issue, or are you just considering it from a developer’s perspective?
Good point! I wasn’t aware of that feature. This is why gathering feedback in forums is so valuable!