Most of our annual trial charges fail - anyone dealt with this?

Hi ​@detectivel-ai-b22303 ,

I'm Tarek from RevenueCat Developer Support, thanks for reaching out, happy to help!

I took a look at your project data and at Apple's own records for some of the failed trials. Your numbers match ours, and I can understand how painful this is for your first month.

22 of the last 29 trial charges failed and went into billing retry. I've already added a grace period, but it still feels really off and it's killing our revenue.

You are right, this failure rate is high. But I did not find a problem in RevenueCat or in your setup. Apple reports each failed renewal as a billing error, and Apple still retries the payment.

Your App Store Server Notifications reach us. Your grace period uses the All Renewals option, so it also covers the first charge after a trial. Other first charges in the same weeks were successful, so your App Store account works correctly.

From what I can see, the cause is the audience and the size of the first charge. Apple does not check if a payment method has funds when a free trial starts. The first real charge comes at the end of the trial. On your annual plan, it is the full yearly price in one payment.

Two facts in your data support this. About a quarter of your trial users cancel within 10 minutes of the start. Also, the three trial users who moved to the monthly plan all paid.

For reference, billing errors cause about a third of your trials that end without a payment. Our State of Subscription Apps 2026 report shows 15.2% for all App Store cancellations.

Apple sets the grace period length at the moment of each failure, and it does not change later for that user. Most of your failures so far received 16 days. Your current setting is 28 days, so the next failures receive 28 days.

A grace period keeps access for its duration while Apple retries the payment. Apple retries for up to 60 days. The grace period does not make a card chargeable, so it cannot fix this rate alone. So far, Apple did not recover any of these charges.

Anyone know what actually helps?

I recommend these three changes.

First, you can make it easy for users to update their payment method. Our SDK shows Apple's billing issue sheet when the user opens your app on iOS 16.4 or later. This is the default, so I recommend that you keep shouldShowInAppMessagesAutomatically set to true.

You can also show your own message when the entitlement has a billingIssueDetectedAt date. In this message, you can add a button that opens https://apps.apple.com/account/billing, where users update their payment method.

Second, you can make the first charge smaller, or move it to the moment of purchase. These two options are worth a test:

• A monthly plan with the trial. A $9.99 charge is more likely to succeed than $59.99 on a card with a low balance.
• A paid introductory offer on the annual plan instead of the free trial. Apple then charges at purchase, so a card that cannot pay fails before the user gets free access.

Third, you can measure the result with Experiments. You can show a new offering to part of your new users. Then you can compare the revenue of each group, not only the trial starts.

If you buy ads, I also recommend that you optimize them for the paid conversion, not for the trial start. Campaigns that optimize for trial starts often bring users who do not pay.

If you want to look at specific users, feel free to open a ticket from your dashboard and mention this thread. I will happily share the per-user detail there.

Let me know if that makes sense and if there's anything else I can help with!

Have an excellent day.

Best regards,