Recurly ships a serious dunning system. Automated retries, account updater integrations, and configurable campaigns handle the mechanical core of failed-payment recovery competently, and teams evaluating their stack should start from that respect rather than from a sales pitch. The interesting question for an operator is narrower: where does the platform's machinery stop, and what quietly falls into the gap?

A gap audit takes one month of failed renewals and sorts every outcome into three buckets: recovered by the platform untouched, recovered only after a human intervened, and never recovered. The first bucket is your baseline, and it is usually healthy. The audit lives in the other two.

The human-intervention bucket is the most instructive. Read twenty of those cases closely and patterns repeat. A customer replied to a generic notice asking a question the notice could not answer, and a person resolved it in one exchange.…