The Summary

Rise Science is one of the most recognized names in sleep, ranked among the top 50 health and fitness apps in the world alongside Strava, Calm, and Whoop, with more than 10 million downloads, multiple Apple "Best Apps" awards, and over 60,000 ratings. As Rise grew its subscription revenue on Stripe web billing alongside its App Store business, it took on a new job: recovering failed payments itself. By partnering with Redux, Rise more than tripled its trial-to-paid recovery rate and recovered multiple six figures in its first four months, with zero engineering lift.

The Challenge: A Technical Co-Founder Who Owned the Payments Stack, and a Leak He Could Not See

Leon Sasson has spent more than a decade building Rise into one of the most recognized names in sleep. As co-founder and CTO, he also owns the unglamorous machinery underneath the product, including how subscriptions get billed and recovered.

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As Rise grew its subscription revenue on Stripe web billing alongside its App Store business, that machinery got more complicated. On the App Store, the retry lifecycle is handled behind the scenes. On the web, recovering a failed payment is the merchant's own job, and it is a different muscle. Leon's team had assumed Stripe's built-in Smart Retries would cover it, and had even built their own retry logic on top. Recovery still plateaued well below where they thought it should be.

The harder problem was that the biggest leak was invisible. Stripe's recovery dashboard excludes trial conversions by default, and for a business built on free trials, that is the bucket that matters most. When Redux analyzed Rise's data, the biggest leak wasn't renewals. It was trials. Failed trial conversions made up about 85% of all recoverable failed volume in a single three-month window. Rise was paying to acquire users, then losing a meaningful share of them to involuntary churn on the very first paid charge, largely out of sight.

"At some point, that is our code and our customers' payments that someone else is touching. As the person responsible for it, that is not a decision I make lightly."

— Leon Sasson, Co-Founder & CTO, Rise Science

What moved him was the engineering pedigree behind Redux, a team that had built payment systems at companies like Twilio and Valon. For a CTO deciding who gets near his payment stack, that mattered.

The Solution: The Failed-Payment Experts, So Rise's Team Can Stay on Product

Rise ships fast, and like most rapidly moving teams it had not spent its engineering cycles becoming an expert in the deep, unglamorous mechanics of recovering failed card payments. That is exactly what Redux specializes in. Redux is the expert on payment failures so Rise's team does not have to be, which keeps their engineers focused on product and growth.

Rise connected Stripe and went live in minutes, with no engineering work. Redux took over failed-payment recovery end to end. Rise stays on Stripe, with nothing to rip out or replace, and Redux now owns the entire process from the first failed charge to the recovered subscriber. Instead of one broad retry schedule, Redux makes a decision on every failed payment:

• Retry timing built on consumer pay cycles. An insufficient-funds decline on a debit card is retried when the money is going to be there, around payday and the start of the month, not on a fixed clock.
• Error-code-specific logic. A "do not honor," an "insufficient funds," and a lost-card decline each follow a different recovery path instead of being treated identically.
• Hard-decline filtering that screens out declines the card networks penalize you for retrying, protecting authorization rates on the charges that do go through.
• Frictionless recovery flows that make it effortless for a customer to update a failed payment, turning a moment of friction into a quick fix.
• Models trained on consumer subscriptions that learn the rhythms of Rise's specific subscriber base.

"Turning it on was easy, and with payments that is rare. There was no heavy integration to make robust before we saw anything."

— Leon Sasson, Co-Founder & CTO, Rise Science

The Results: The Hidden Bucket Became the Biggest Win

The trials Stripe was not surfacing, the leakiest and most overlooked bucket, saw the largest lift, and it held steady across four straight months.

• Trial-to-paid recovery: 6% to ~19%, more than 3x.
• Subscription renewals: 16% to ~29%, nearly 2x.
• Overall recovery: ~8% to ~21%.

In its first four months on Stripe with Redux, Rise:

• Recovered multiple six figures in incremental revenue above what its own system and Stripe were already capturing.
• Brought back thousands of subscribers from involuntary churn each month, more than 2.5x what Stripe and its own retry logic were saving before.
• Put those cohorts on track for roughly 3x the recovered revenue in lifetime value, none of which Redux bills against.
• Earned a roughly 10x return, with zero engineering lift and a smoother recovery experience for customers.

Why This Matters for Any Consumer App on Stripe Web Billing

Rise's situation is not unique. Any consumer subscription app that grows a web billing channel takes on the recovery work the App Store otherwise handles, and if it runs free trials, the most valuable bucket of failed payments is the one Stripe's dashboard leaves out by default. If you are spending on acquisition, you are likely losing a share of those users on the first charge without seeing it. That is involuntary churn, customers who never chose to leave, and it is the easiest form of churn to fix.

For Rise, closing the gap showed up in three places at once: more revenue recovered, more customers retained, and freed-up engineering resources.

"It has quietly become one of the highest-ROI tools we run, and it is one less thing I have to think about."

— Leon Sasson, Co-Founder & CTO, Rise Science

Running free trials on Stripe? The leak is bigger than your dashboard shows.