Dunning

Dunning is what happens between a failed renewal payment and either recovery or the end of the subscription. Stripe, PayPal and Mollie retry failed renewals on their own schedules. LicenseDock tracks the failure, tells the customer, keeps their access while the gateway retries, and ends the subscription if the payment is still missing after the grace period.

Settings

Components → LicenseDock → Settings → Automation → Subscription Dunning

Setting	Default	Range	Notes
Dunning grace period	14 days	1–90	Days after the first failed payment before the subscription is ended and the license expires

The grace period is counted from the first failure in the current dunning cycle, so later retries don't restart it.

WARNING

The settings page says a value of 0 means "never auto-cancel". In 1.9.3 a saved 0 is stored as 14, so the backstop always runs.

The grace period is enforced by the LicenseDock - Reminders & Expiration scheduled task. See The Reminders & Expiration Task.

What Happens

Step	Subscription	License	Customer email	Event log
Renewal payment fails	past_due	Stays active	Payment Failed, first failure only	Dunning Failed
Gateway retries and fails again	past_due	active	None	Dunning Failed
Gateway retry succeeds	active, dates move forward	active, expiry extended	Renewal Receipt	Renewed, Renewal payment recovered
Grace period runs out	expired	expired	Subscription Cancelled (Payment Failed)	Expired

The admin gets Subscription Expired when the grace period runs out.

Failures are recognised from these gateway events:

Gateway	Events
Stripe	invoice.payment_failed
PayPal	BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.PAYMENT.FAILED, BILLING.SUBSCRIPTION.SUSPENDED
Mollie	A failed recurring payment

A failure notice that arrives after the customer has already paid (a delayed webhook) is ignored, so a customer who just recovered isn't flipped back to past due or emailed again.

During Dunning

Area	Behaviour
License	Stays active. The API keeps validating, activating and serving downloads
Portal – Subscriptions	The card shows "Last payment failed." and a Renew Now button, and tells the customer to update their payment details with the gateway
Portal – Downloads	Products whose only subscription is past due are hidden from the Downloads page until it recovers or ends
Plan changes	Not available until the subscription is active again
Admin – Subscriptions	Shows the attempt count and days since the first failure, for example "Attempt 2 · 5d"

Recovery

Route	Result
The gateway's next retry succeeds (for example after the customer updates their card with Stripe, PayPal or Mollie)	Subscription back to active, counter cleared
Customer clicks Renew Now	Checkout for the same plan. The subscription is extended, the old gateway subscription is cancelled, and auto-renewal starts again on the new payment
A retry succeeds after the grace period ended	Subscription and license come back to active, so no payment is taken without access

Cancelling During Dunning

A customer can click Cancel Auto-Renewal on a past-due subscription to stop further retries. The subscription stays past_due until the grace period runs out, then expires. Because the customer chose to cancel, they get the neutral Subscription Expired email.

Suspension

Dunning never suspends a license. The suspended status is used when a chargeback or dispute is opened on the order, and when you set a subscription to Suspended yourself. See License Statuses.

Emails

Email	Recipient	When
Payment Failed	Customer	First failed renewal in a dunning cycle. Links to the Subscriptions page
Subscription Cancelled (Payment Failed)	Customer	Grace period ran out
Subscription Expired	Customer	Grace period ran out after the customer had cancelled auto-renewal
Subscription Expired	Admin	Grace period ran out

Edit the wording in Components → LicenseDock → Email Templates. See Email Templates.