Building a Resilient Subscription Strategy with Pagos

Subscription businesses are having a moment right now. From streaming services to app memberships, pet food deliveries, meal kits, and more, nearly all corners of the market have embraced and expanded subscription pricing models. While they may be popular, subscriptions aren’t exactly easy to execute; running a successful subscription business in 2025 means navigating payment failures, growing fraud rates, and changing customer expectations around payment options and pricing plans.

We were excited to read Recurly’s latest State of Subscriptions report, as it clearly demonstrates the priorities of best-in-class subscription businesses. The bottom line? The way people want to pay is changing fast, and keeping up is essential if you want to thrive in the market today.

What remains consistent over time is the core goal of subscription management: keep your customers happy and subscribed for as long as possible. In other words, minimize churn. At Pagos, we believe the best way to reach this goal is to build a truly resilient subscription strategy by monitoring the right things, experimenting wisely, and acting on your findings. Data brings voluntary and involuntary churn to the forefront, and helps you identify where your payments setup might be contributing to revenue loss. Here are just a few of the ways Pagos can make your subscription business more resilient.

Track the Performance of Diverse Payment Method Offerings

A key feature of any optimized payments stack is an optimized payment method mix. While this is true for all merchants, it’s especially important for subscription sellers for whom payment method mix can make or break customer retention. If a customer can’t pay the way they want, they may churn before you realize any of their lifetime value (LTV). That’s why the first step in building a resilient payments strategy is establishing the right payment method mix for your desired market and monitoring performance by method over time.

In our blog post on optimizing your payment method mix, we walk through ways to measure performance by payment method using Pagos Insights, including:

• Comparing approval rates across methods

• Identifying method-specific decline reasons

• Measuring fraud declines by method 

Once you establish a baseline, you can start optimizing by adapting your mix with evolving customer trends—adding new popular options and deleting those that cause friction. According to Recurly, 48% of customers say multiple payment options are a top priority, and alternative payment methods like digital wallets are becoming increasingly popular in the subscription world. Apple Pay usage alone grew 269% in the last year! Are you keeping pace?

Note: Offering a variety of payment methods isn’t just a way to satisfy customers. Many alternative payment methods often have lower fraud rates than credit or debit cards, higher approval rates, and even higher average order values.

Monitor Flexible Pricing Experiments

Experimentation is the backbone of any modern subscription business. At Pagos, we’ve always believed the key to smart experimentation lies in context, specifically in bringing more business info into your payments data. We enable our customers to enrich transactions with custom metadata that links payments to subscription types, plan details, customer segments, cohorts, and more. Whether you’re using a third-party tool or managing subscriptions in-house, this context lets you measure performance with precision.

Recurly’s report confirms something we’ve noticed in the industry: flexible and ramp-up pricing are gaining popularity as powerful options for enticing new subscription customers. Flexible pricing means giving customers the option to pay at their desired interval (i.e. monthly or annually), while ramp-up pricing involves starting with a low, introductory rate that steadily increases over time. These strategies can boost acquisition, but only if they don’t create downstream problems; as such, you'll want to run experiments with them before committing to anything long term.

Should you run an experiment with flexible or ramp-up pricing, you’ll want to contextualize and segment your resulting payments data by plan type or pricing structure. With Pagos Insights, you can then track the results of any experiment and answer valuable questions like:

• Are chargebacks or refunds more common for customers on certain price plans?

• Do customers on monthly plans churn faster than annual ones?

• Are customers enrolling at an introductory price and churning—either voluntarily or because of insufficient funds—once the subscription fee increases?

Reduce Passive Churn with Smart Retry Strategies

It may sound extreme, but you really can’t expect to succeed as a subscription business without a well-honed retry strategy. Involuntary churn caused by unexpected payment failures is a fixable problem, and one your payments team can tackle with the right tools in their pocket. We’ve written a whole use case on how Pagos can help you design the perfect retry strategy, but the short version is this: not all retries are created equal. Pagos gives you the tools to:

• Track retry success rates across processors, times of day, or customer segments

• Detect “stop all recurring” declines so you can connect with those customers and potentially re-engage them

• Minimize expired/replaced card declines in the first place with account updater and network tokens

These strategies are especially important when so many declines (48% in Recurly’s data) are on debit cards—the most popular payment method employed by subscription customers. That’s a huge volume of payments that might be recoverable with better timing and targeting!

Build Resiliently

Subscription businesses thrive when payments work as expected and falter when they don’t. Whether it’s checkout friction, a failed debit card, or a flawed retry strategy, the challenges of subscription billing add up fast. But with the right data and tools—and by treating payments as a strategic business lever—those challenges become opportunities to grow revenue and customer trust.

At Pagos, we help you make every part of your subscription strategy measurable, testable, and resilient. From the moment a customer checks out to the day their plan renews (or doesn’t), you can spot what’s working, fix what’s not, and stay ahead of industry shifts like changing payment preferences.

If you want to build a subscription business that lasts, start with better payments. We’ll show you how.