Disclosure: we're the Swipe Again team. We sell the flat-fee option in this comparison, so don't take our word for any of it — the math below is the whole argument, and you can run it with your own numbers in about two minutes.
Percentage-of-recovered pricing has the best pitch in SaaS: "You only pay when we recover money for you."
It sounds perfectly aligned. If the software recovers nothing, you pay nothing. If it recovers a lot, well, you're happy to share. And this pricing model is real, not hypothetical — established recovery providers publicly price their service at 10–20% of whatever revenue they recover for you.
Here's the thing nobody puts in the pitch: the percentage is charged on your worst month, at the worst rate, precisely because it's your worst month.
Run the math
Say your subscription business has a bad month — a bank changes its risk rules, a card network has an issue, a batch of annual renewals hits expired cards. Failed payments pile up, and your recovery software does its job and recovers $10,000 of it.
At 10% of recovered revenue, that month costs you $1,000.
At 20%, it costs you $2,000.
Now a genuinely terrible month — the kind where recovery matters most. $25,000 recovered:
At 10%: $2,500.
At 20%: $5,000.
A flat fee of $179 costs $179 in both months. And in the good months. And in the catastrophic ones. The bill never reads your Stripe dashboard and decides to grow.
The alignment runs backwards
The pitch says the vendor only wins when you win. But look at what the meter is actually attached to. A percentage-of-recovered vendor earns more when more of your payments fail and get recovered. Their best month is your worst month, monetized twice: once by whatever caused the failures, and once by the recovery fee on top.
It also quietly penalizes the merchants with the biggest problem. A store with sloppy card hygiene and a high failure rate pays a fortune in recovery fees. A store with the same revenue and a low failure rate pays almost nothing — for the same software, running the same retries. The price isn't attached to the product. It's attached to the size of your leak.
And there's a subtler cost: you can't budget it. Nobody can tell you in January what recovery will cost in October, because it depends on how badly October goes. Flat infrastructure — your billing platform, your email tool — doesn't work this way. You know the number before the month starts.
The honest case for the percentage
We're not going to pretend the percentage model has no place, because it does:
- Zero fixed cost is real. If you're pre-revenue or tiny, paying something only when money comes back is genuinely easier than a monthly bill.
- It's a low-commitment trial. Percentage pricing lets a skeptic test recovery without a subscription decision.
- For very small recovery volumes, it's cheaper. If a service recovers $300 for you in a month, 20% is $60 — less than our $179.
That last point is the honest break-even, and it's worth doing on your own numbers. At 10% of recovered, the percentage model costs more than $179 the moment a service recovers more than $1,790 in a month. At 20%, the line is $895 a month of recovered revenue. If your failed payments are anywhere near those figures — and for a subscription business doing even modest volume, a bad week can get there — the "aligned" pricing is the expensive option wearing the friendly costume.
What we'd actually check before buying either model
- Your monthly failed-payment volume. Not your revenue — the dollar value of payments that fail and are realistically recoverable. That's the base both models charge against.
- What the recovery includes. Retries alone aren't recovery. Are dunning emails, card-update pages, and a backfill of your existing failures in the price, or add-ons?
- What happens in the worst month, in writing. Multiply your worst plausible recovery month by the percentage. That's your real price ceiling — or rather, it has no ceiling, which is the point.
We built Swipe Again (https://swipeagain.com) to be the boring option here: failed-payment recovery across Stripe, Recharge, Chargebee, Recurly, and the other major subscription platforms for $179 a month flat — no percentage, no tiers — because we think recovery is infrastructure, and infrastructure should have a price you can say out loud in January.
But run your own numbers first. If your recoverable volume is small, the percentage might honestly be cheaper for now. Just know exactly where your break-even sits — because your worst month will find it.
