RevGuard Churnkey, Baremetrics Recover and ProfitWell Retain: what they cost over a year, and the one-time alternative
This compares what Churnkey, Baremetrics Recover and similar tools cost over a year, what they include, and when paying monthly is the right choice.
What they charge
Pricing changes, so check each site before deciding, but the shapes are stable:
- Churnkey: a monthly platform fee that scales with revenue, with cancel-flow, pause and dunning features bundled. For a business under $50k MRR, budget in the low hundreds a month.
- Baremetrics Recover: an add-on to a Baremetrics subscription, priced as a monthly fee tied to your MRR band.
- ProfitWell Retain (Paddle): free up to a recovery threshold, then a percentage of recovered revenue. Cheap at the start, and the percentage never ends.
At $150 a month, five years is $9,000. At 10% of recovered revenue on a $20k MRR business recovering $340 a month above Stripe's baseline, five years is about $2,000, rising with your growth.
What they do that a self-hosted setup does not
Be fair to them:
- In-app cancel flows and pause offers. Churnkey's main product is voluntary churn, not failed cards. If you want an exit survey and a "pause instead" offer inside your app, that is a real feature we do not have.
- Benchmarks across thousands of companies. Baremetrics and ProfitWell can tell you how your churn compares. A self-hosted setup only knows your data.
- Hosted card-update pages with their branding and A/B tests. We use Stripe's own billing portal link, which is plain and works.
- Nothing to run. They host it. You run ours on your own machine or a small server, which is a five-minute setup and then a Docker container that needs to stay up.
What the one-time setup does
RevGuard is the recovery loop only: retries branched by decline code, a five-email sequence with a fresh card-update link per email, a re-check before every action, an expiring-card warning 45 days out, PayPal handled as well as Stripe, and a dashboard of recovered, open and lost in dollars, with decline reasons ranked by money. $179 once for the complete kit, single parts from $49, six months of updates included, your billing data never leaves your machine. The compare section on the front page lists the trade-offs side by side.
When to still pay monthly
- You are above roughly $100k MRR and the percentage plans start to look cheap next to an engineer's hour.
- Voluntary churn is your real problem and you want the cancel flow more than the dunning.
- Nobody on the team is willing to keep one container running.
Otherwise, the arithmetic is simple: one payment against sixty of them, for the same core job.