Hey there, 

Billing errors come from the respective store and we dont have anything reason really for why the error happened in more depth other than the fact that billing issues occur when a user is unable to complete a subscription purchase due to an invalid or expired payment method. When this occurs, RevenueCat sends a BILLING_ISSUE event to webhooks, integrations, and the customer history page.

RevenueCat will only send one billing issue event -- additional payment failures won't trigger additional billing issue events, unless a renewal is successful between payment failures or the subscription ends and is restarted.

More information on Billing issues and grace periods can be found here: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/how-grace-periods-work

Same here. All 7 of my free trials didn’t cancel and when their trial finishes revenuecat says billing error. But monthly without trial works. I hear that app purchases have this problem about 20% of time but It’s hard to believe that 7 out of 7 will be billing issues. 100%. anyone have solution?

It’s honestly been so frustrating, I’ve lost over $150 in revenue from 3 failed yearly trials. 

What is worse is we lose money when our customers use the product a lot and don’t pay!

I'm from Brazil and I created an application, we offered 7 days of testing for users and after that, we had a large volume of "pending payments" and "billing issue" did you experience this too?

I had 35 subscriptions and only 5 converted.

Did you manage to solve it?

No not yet. Right now we are having over 50% billing errors.  About of 51 free trails over 35 were billing errors,. We use google app promotions so I’m thinking google just sends crap free trials. I think we will move only to web payments now and do a free trial but will charge their card $1 and refund it within 7 days to verify that card is valid. It’s absolutely amazing that google play doesn’t validate cards

hi guys, did anyone ever get any more insight here? our last 5 out of 5 trial subscriptions have all failed to convert due to billing error- here in the usa. very frustrating, seems too high a percentage for coincidence- can you share any insight into what happened for you? thanks!

Unfortunately it’s just normal with google and apple. The only way to fix it is get rid of trial or try a $1 trial. I’ve talked to many people (they say it’s normal) and google support about. They just tell you to talk to google community about.  This month I got over 75% billing errors (that’s U.S traffic! not international)  I used google ads to send me the people and look at the screenshot I attached. Absolutely insane. That’s just a small sample.  We will from now on build our own billing system and never send paid traffic to the google play store ever again. 

Hey guys, thanks so much for the feedback. I have to say though this seems insane and impossible. We’ve had 80% billing failure on the last 46 trial conversions. We also did a google app promotion campaign, but we got a lot of traffic from Apple search ads as well. What would the possible human explanation for what’s happening? There’s some kind of cultural trend where 80% of people buy prepaid Visa cards in order to get free trial activations on apps as a fraudulent way of getting free service? It seems too far-fetched. What could be happening here? 
 

We’re also seeing an enormous % of our trials go into “Billing Error”. It’s also consistent now, there must be some sort of real issue, as that many billing errors is unlikely.

Hey all, 

The Billing errors come from the respective store and we dont have anything reason really for why the error happened in more depth other than the fact that billing issues occur when a user is unable to complete a subscription purchase due to an invalid or expired payment method. When this occurs, we send a BILLING_ISSUE event to webhooks, integrations, and the customer history page.

More information on Billing issues and grace periods can be found here: https://www.revenuecat.com/docs/how-grace-periods-work

Unfortunately, I am not able to gather more info on why a billing issue would occur here and it is just redirected message from the purchase likely failing on the store itself. 

Has anyone seen any improvements after adding a grace period?

The audience hypothesis is very strong. I have two apps, both with 20 trials per day but very different audiences and also packages.

• One has a 7% billing issue rate (7-day trial, yearly plan).
• The other has a 35% billing issue rate (3-day trial, with weekly, monthly, and yearly plans).

I enabled a grace period for the second app two weeks ago (adding 3 more days for Apple to keep retrying charges), but it hasn't shown much effectiveness so far.

hi Diego- as far as I understand the grace period has no impact on billing retries, though apple is murky on this point. we leave grace at 16 days and it does increase conversions substantially but we still have an enormous failure rate. perhaps those conversions would increase even if grace was not enabled? I don’t know. 

Adding on to that, I initially had grace period and removed it (just to try something out of desperation) & it didn’t have any significant impact. So, I assume adding grace period wouldn’t dramatically change much as well.

Yeap, there's no official documentation if they retry and the cycle. The closest we can get is this:

"Enabling Billing Grace Period requires you turn on and complete configurations in App Store Connect, and use StoreKit to verify subscribers’ renewal states so they retain access to subscription content while in the billing retry state." - https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-subscriptions/enable-billing-grace-period-for-auto-renewable-subscriptions/

I'm monitoring some users in the grace period. They are converting on different days—some 1 day after the billing error, others on day 3.

Before the grace period was enabled, some users fixed their credit card issues when the trial ended due to billing errors and then converted. Now, the final conversion rate is lower than before. These retries (if they exist) are not succeeding as often. However, I need more data to confirm this trend.

Latest update:

• 12 days with Grace Period ON for 3 days and no signal that was getting better. Less than 10% of users that got Billing Issue were converting later.
• Without Grace Period, 30% of users that were having billing issue were converting. I'm turning OFF again. FYI: My model is 3-day trial.