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Subscription Payment Failure Handler

Example prompt: "When a Stripe subscription payment fails, email the customer a link to update their card. If it still fails after 3 days, alert the account manager on Slack."

How to automate payment failure handling with GloriaMundo

The Problem

Failed subscription payments are a quiet source of churn. When a customer's card is declined — whether due to expiry, insufficient funds, or a bank hold — most billing systems retry silently a few times and then cancel the subscription. The customer may not even realise what happened until they lose access. Meanwhile, the business loses recurring revenue that could have been recovered with a simple, timely nudge. Handling these cases manually means someone has to monitor Stripe for failed charges, send personalised emails, track retry outcomes, and escalate unresolved cases — a process that is easy to let slip, especially at scale.

How GloriaMundo Solves It

We build a workflow that triggers when Stripe reports a failed subscription payment. An LLM step drafts a polite, clear email to the customer explaining that their payment did not go through, with a direct link to update their payment method. An integration step sends this email via Gmail. A conditional step then monitors whether the payment succeeds on Stripe's automatic retry within three days. If the retry also fails, the workflow escalates by posting a message to the account manager's Slack channel with the customer details, subscription value, and a link to the Stripe dashboard. Glass Box preview shows you the customer email and the escalation message before anything is sent, so you can review tone and accuracy.

Example Workflow Steps

  1. Trigger (webhook): Fires when Stripe emits an invoice.payment_failed event for a subscription.
  2. Step 1 (integration): Fetch the customer's details from Stripe — name, email, subscription plan, and amount due.
  3. Step 2 (LLM): Draft a personalised email to the customer explaining the failed payment and including a link to update their payment method.
  4. Step 3 (integration): Send the email to the customer via Gmail.
  5. Step 4 (conditional): Wait and check whether the payment has been recovered within 3 days. If recovered, end the workflow. If still failing, proceed to escalation.
  6. Step 5 (integration): Post an escalation message to the account manager on Slack with the customer name, subscription value, and a direct link to the Stripe customer page.

Integrations Used

  • Stripe — source of the failed payment event and customer subscription details
  • Gmail — sends the payment recovery email to the customer
  • Slack — receives escalation alerts for the account manager when recovery fails

Who This Is For

SaaS founders, subscription businesses, and finance teams who want to reduce involuntary churn by catching failed payments early and handling them with a consistent, timely process instead of hoping someone notices.

Time & Cost Saved

Manually monitoring failed payments, emailing customers, and tracking retries takes roughly 10-15 minutes per case. For a business with 20-30 failed payments per month, that is 3-7 hours of dunning work. This workflow handles the entire process automatically, with human involvement only for escalated cases. Even recovering a small percentage of otherwise-churned subscriptions can pay for itself many times over. The workflow uses integration, LLM, and conditional steps, costing a few credits per failed payment event.