Is Paddle Retain or Stunning cheaper?

Paddle Retain starts at $0 additional for Paddle Billing customers; Paddle Billing itself is 5 percent plus 50 cents per checkout transaction (free plan available). Stunning starts at Sliding scale by MRR; approximately $120 per month at around $40,000 MRR, with lower prices at smaller sizes (15 days trial).

Paddle Retain vs Stunning

An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.

The short answer

Both sides assessed

Paddle Retain compared with Stunning

Stunning costs roughly $120 a month at $40,000 MRR, works on Stripe, and offers more recovery channels than Retain does, including SMS, in-app bars, and abandonment emails. Retain is free but ties you to Paddle. A Stripe shop that wants the best recovery for the least money should buy Stunning; a company that also wants tax compliance solved should look at Paddle and take Retain as a bonus.

Stunning compared with Paddle Retain

Paddle Retain is free for merchants already billing through Paddle and covers recovery, cancellation flows, and term optimization. Stunning costs money but works on Stripe without changing your merchant of record. If you are on Paddle, use Retain. If you are on Stripe and not willing to hand your billing to a merchant of record, Stunning is the recovery tool to buy.

Choose Paddle Retain if

Software companies that already sell through Paddle as merchant of record, or that are choosing a billing provider and want tax compliance, subscription billing, and a full retention toolkit from one vendor at one transaction fee rather than assembling three subscriptions on top of Stripe.

Choose Stunning if

Stripe-billed SaaS and subscription companies from roughly $10,000 MRR upward that want the involuntary-churn problem solved properly and cheaply, particularly small teams who would otherwise be relying on Stripe's default retries and a single generic failure email.

Side by side

13 attributes

Attribute	Paddle Retain	Stunning
Category	Retention	Retention
Starting price	$0 additional for Paddle Billing customers; Paddle Billing itself is 5 percent plus 50 cents per checkout transaction (free plan available)	Sliding scale by MRR; approximately $120 per month at around $40,000 MRR, with lower prices at smaller sizes (15 days trial)
Pricing model	Bundled at no additional cost into Paddle Billing's merchant-of-record transaction fee. Standalone deployment on other billing providers is quote-based and historically structured as a percentage of recovered revenue.	Sliding scale based on MRR, with every feature included on every plan. No feature tiers, no per-recovery fees, and no percentage of recovered revenue.
Free plan	Retain is included in full at no extra charge for every Paddle Billing merchant regardless of size.	No
Free trial	Not applicable; there is no separate Retain subscription to trial for Paddle merchants	15 days, with the vendor stating it will extend the trial on request
Best for	Software companies that already sell through Paddle as merchant of record, or that are choosing a billing provider and want tax compliance, subscription billing, and a full retention toolkit from one vendor at one transaction fee rather than assembling three subscriptions on top of Stripe.	Stripe-billed SaaS and subscription companies from roughly $10,000 MRR upward that want the involuntary-churn problem solved properly and cheaply, particularly small teams who would otherwise be relying on Stripe's default retries and a single generic failure email.
Setup time	Payment recovery is effectively instant for Paddle merchants: enable it in the dashboard and it runs, because Paddle already processes your charges. Cancellation flows require configuring the flow and wiring the cancel action through Paddle.js, which is a small front-end task. Term optimization is configured as a campaign.	Minutes for the core product. Connect Stripe, choose from pre-written templates, and dunning is live. Adding your own branding, a custom domain for the update pages, and the in-app notification bar takes a little longer and is worth doing before you judge results.
Learning curve	Low. The recovery half requires no decisions at all. Cancellation flows involve choosing offers and their generosity, which is the same judgement call every tool in this category demands, and Retain gives you fewer levers to get it wrong with.	Very low. There are no tiers to reason about and no offers to design. The only real decisions are cadence and copy, and the templates ship with sensible defaults.
Platforms	Paddle Billing dashboard, Paddle.js, Legacy ProfitWell interface for cancellation flows and term optimization, Standalone connectors for Stripe, Chargebee, Zuora, Recurly, Braintree	Web app, Hosted payment update pages on a custom domain, In-app notification bar embed, Email and SMS delivery
Compliance	SOC 2, PCI DSS, GDPR, Global sales tax and VAT compliance as merchant of record	GDPR, PCI handled by Stripe; Stunning does not store raw card data
Founded	2012	2012
Headquarters	London, United Kingdom	United States
Ownership	Venture-backed	Independent and bootstrapped

Strengths and limitations

Paddle Retain

Strengths

Genuinely free for Paddle Billing merchants, which makes it the only retention toolkit in this category with no incremental cost.
Covers three jobs where competitors cover one or two: failed-payment recovery, cancellation deflection, and term optimization.
Term optimization is unique in this category and attacks churn structurally by moving customers to annual terms rather than fighting each cancellation individually.
Zero installation for the recovery half, because Paddle is already processing the payments and does not need permission to retry them.

Limitations

Not really an independent product. For most buyers, evaluating Retain means evaluating whether to hand your billing to Paddle, which is a much larger decision.
Standalone pricing is unpublished and requires a sales conversation, and the historical revenue-share structure becomes expensive as recovered volume grows.
Paddle's 5 percent plus 50 cents is roughly two points above Stripe, which is a real cost if you do not need merchant-of-record tax services.
Cancellation flows are less configurable than a dedicated tool: fewer offer types, weaker segmentation, and no serious A/B testing compared with Churnkey.

Stunning

Strengths

The deepest recovery channel mix at this price: Smart Retries, backup payment methods, email, SMS, in-app bars, pre-dunning, abandonment emails, and unpaid reactivation.
Every feature is included on every plan, so there is no tier gaming and no feature discovered to be locked after purchase.
Priced well below Churnkey and Churn Buster at comparable revenue, which makes it the realistic dunning choice for a small company.
Thirteen years of operation and a claimed $13 billion recovered, with the specific edge-case features that only come from that much time in one problem.

Limitations

Only three payment stacks: Stripe, Foxy, and Subbly. Stripe is effectively the only real integration, and if you are not on it the product is unavailable to you.
No cancel flow, no deflection offers, no pause or discount interception. Voluntary churn is entirely outside the product's scope.
No subscription analytics, health scoring, or playbooks, so it will always be one tool among several rather than a platform.
Pricing is a slider rather than a published table, so you have to visit the site and enter your MRR to learn your number.

Pricing compared

Paddle Retain

Bundled at no additional cost into Paddle Billing's merchant-of-record transaction fee. Standalone deployment on other billing providers is quote-based and historically structured as a percentage of recovered revenue.

Included with Paddle Billing$0 additional
Retain StandaloneQuote

If Paddle is already your merchant of record, Retain is free capability and there is nothing to decide; turn it on. If you are choosing a billing provider, Retain plus tax compliance plus fraud handling in one 5 percent fee is a coherent bundle that a small international software business should take seriously against Stripe plus three subscriptions. If you are committed to Stripe and only want the retention tooling, standalone Retain is the weakest option in this batch: unpublished pricing, a sales conversation, and a revenue-share structure that punishes success. The product is good; the standalone commercial terms are not.

Stunning

Sliding scale based on MRR, with every feature included on every plan. No feature tiers, no per-recovery fees, and no percentage of recovered revenue.

Single plan, sliding scaleApproximately $120 at $40,000 MRR

This is the best price-to-capability ratio in the involuntary-churn half of this category. Around $120 a month at $40,000 MRR buys more recovery channels than Churnkey's $250 Starter plan does, and the every-feature-included structure means the price you see is the price of the whole product. What you are giving up is scope and modernity: no cancel flows, no analytics, no AI, no offers, and a processor list of exactly three. If you are on Stripe and your problem is failed payments, nothing here is worse than the more expensive options and several things are better. If your problem is people deliberately cancelling, Stunning does not address it at all and its low price is irrelevant to you.

Editorial verdict on each

Paddle Retain

Paddle Retain is excellent value and almost impossible to evaluate on its own terms, because for most companies the real question is whether to use Paddle at all. For existing Paddle merchants there is no decision: three retention mechanisms including one nobody else builds, at zero incremental cost, with no installation for the recovery half. For companies choosing a billing provider, Retain meaningfully strengthens Paddle's case against Stripe once you price in what a tax service plus a dunning tool plus a cancel-flow tool would otherwise cost. The weak path is standalone Retain on top of Stripe: unpublished pricing, a required sales conversation, and a revenue-share structure that grows more expensive precisely as it succeeds. The cancellation flows are also thinner than a dedicated tool. Take it as a strong bundled bonus, not as the reason to change how you take money.

Read the full Paddle Retain profile

Stunning

Stunning is the correct first purchase for a Stripe-billed small business with a failed-payment problem. It costs roughly half what Churnkey's entry plan does, includes every feature at every price point, and works the recovery through more channels than anything else at this level: retries, backup cards, email, SMS, in-app banners, pre-dunning, abandonment follow-ups, and automatic reactivation of unpaid accounts. Fourteen years of doing one job shows in the details. The two boundaries are absolute rather than negotiable. It works on Stripe, Foxy, and Subbly and nothing else, and it does nothing whatsoever about customers who deliberately cancel. Accept both and it is the best value in this category; need either fixed and you are shopping elsewhere.

Read the full Stunning profile

Paddle Retain profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Stunning last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.