Set up failed-payment recovery

Failed-payment recovery (dunning) runs automatically once you’re on the Starter plan or above — there’s no toggle to turn on. This tutorial walks through confirming it’s active and knowing what to expect when a charge fails.

Background reading: Failed-Payment Recovery.

1. Confirm your plan

1. Open Plan & billing in the Curobi admin.
2. Confirm your active plan is Starter or above. On Free, a failed charge starts no retry — upgrade, or use the Free plan’s one-time 14-day trial to try retries first. See Pricing & Plans.
3. To use the Recovery dashboard in step 4, you need Growth or above. Retries and the update-card emails work on Starter without it.

2. Know what happens automatically

Once you’re on Starter or above, nothing further needs configuring — recovery runs on every subscription by default:

1. A recurring charge fails.
2. Curobi retries automatically three times over 7 days — on days 2, 4 and 7 after the failure.
3. The customer gets an email with a secure link to update their payment method.
4. If all retries fail, the subscription pauses — it is not cancelled, so the customer can still come back and resume it after fixing their card.

3. Check the branding on the recovery email

The “update your payment method” email uses the same branding as every other Curobi email. Go to Settings → Email branding and confirm your logo, colors, and from-name are set — see Set up branded email notifications if you haven’t configured this yet.

4. Monitor recovery

On Growth and above:

1. Open Recovery in the Curobi admin.
2. Check the revenue at risk and revenue recovered KPIs periodically.
3. Use the activity table to see individual subscriptions currently mid-retry.

On Business and above, dunning activity also feeds the Subscription Risk Center’s ranked action queue, so you don’t have to check the Recovery page separately every day.

5. Test it (development store only)

On a development store, you can force a failed charge using Shopify’s test payment gateways  (most support a specific card number that simulates a decline). After forcing a failure:

1. Confirm the subscription shows up in Recovery with a “retrying” status.
2. Confirm the customer (test account) receives the payment-update email.
3. Let the retry schedule play out (or wait for the scheduled retries) and confirm the subscription either recovers or auto-pauses as expected — never cancels outright.