Involuntary churn
Also known as: Passive churn, Delinquent churn
Subscribers who lose access because of payment failures — expired cards, insufficient funds, chargebacks — not a deliberate cancel.
Involuntary churn is usually 20–40% of total churn and is entirely addressable with dunning: retry failed charges, update card credentials via Stripe or Braintree account updater, and send a recover email sequence. A cancellation save flow does not reduce involuntary churn — it needs a separate dunning tool or built-in WooCommerce Subscriptions retry logic.
Worked example
A store with 5% monthly gross churn finds, on audit, that 1.5 percentage points come from declined renewal charges. That is involuntary churn. Fixing dunning before tuning a save flow is the correct order of operations.
Related terms
- Voluntary churn- Subscribers who intentionally cancel. This is what a save flow targets.
- Churn rate- The percentage of subscribers who cancel in a given period. Usually reported as a monthly percentage.
Related reading
Reduce churn with ChurnStop
Free WooCommerce Subscriptions plugin. Intercept cancellations with targeted offers, stay click-to-cancel compliant, report MRR preserved.
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