Retain is the built-in retention toolkit of Paddle Billing, the subscription billing service of Paddle. Its main job is dunning: recovering subscription renewals whose payment fails, for example because a card has expired. Retain also runs cancellation flows with personalized offers and suggests annual-plan upgrades to raise customer lifetime value.
When a renewal payment fails, Retain detects it through its connection to Paddle Billing or Paddle Classic, with no webhook or API call from the seller. It retries the charge up to seven times, at times its algorithm picks from the decline reason, card type, buyer location and other signals. When a retry fails, it sends up to four recovery emails that ask the buyer to update the payment details, and the buyer sees an in-app notice on login. At the end of the dunning window, 30 days by default, the subscription is cancelled, paused or left past due, as the seller chose.
Retain comes at no extra cost with Paddle Billing, which charges a fee on each transaction.