Billing issue on free trial customers that didn't cancel and about to convert

I'm having the same problem.

And I've seen that there are many posts about this error from many years ago. Is there anything the RevenueCat team can do?

Hey ​@frank-chen-e05f14, ​@odontoprescrev-dev, 

Thank you for reaching out!

To give more context, billing errors happen at the store level. When a subscription is due to renew, Apple is the one actually charging the customer's payment method, and if that charge fails (expired card, insufficient funds, temporary card, etc.), Apple fires the billing issue and starts retrying. We receive that signal and reflect it in the customer's history as a BILLING_ISSUE event.
 
The customers you're seeing who did convert to paying after the billing error, those are cases where Apple's retry succeeded during the billing retry. The ones who lost access are cases where Apple kept retrying until the grace period ran out without a successful charge, and then we received the EXPIRATION event and revoked entitlements:

If the customer’s billing is invalid, the renewal fails and the user’s subscription enters a billing retry state, where the App Store attempts to collect payment for up to 60 days. This billing retry lowers the rate of involuntary churn and prevents the need to re-acquire subscribers if they churned. 

More context here: https://developer.apple.com/documentation/storekit/reducing-involuntary-subscriber-churn

The best way to tell whether this is actually abnormal is to calculate your actual ratio. You should check the total trials that were due to convert vs. how many hit a billing error over the same period.
 
To help in this (and more!), we publish industry-wide benchmarks that are directly relevant here. Our State of Subscription Apps 2026 report should help here, it covers 115,000+ apps and $16B in revenue, and specifically page 123 goes through some stats on billing and errors:
 

App Store: 82.9% voluntary unsubscribe, 15.2% billing error Google Play: 66.3% voluntary unsubscribe, 32.2% billing error

Billing errors account for 32.2% of Google Play cancellations versus 15.2% on the App Store. Voluntary unsubscribes dominate on both platforms. The primary platform difference is not unsubscribe behavior — it's billing reliability.

 
You can find the full report here: https://www.revenuecat.com/state-of-subscription-apps/ and a whole episode in our Sub Club podcast goes in a bit more depth on some other metrics here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UO0NQNfICwo.

So, roughly 1 in 6 iOS cancellations are billing-related, which is the industry median. It's not a small number, but it does indicate this is a structural part of the iOS subscription ecosystem, not a sign of anything misconfigured on your end. If your ratio is in that range, this is standard involuntary churn. Unfortunately, there’s nothing we can do on our end to control this.

Hope this helps!