Know when your subscription renewals fail, or stop running at all.
Renewals run at night, in the background, with nobody watching. A bad batch can cost a day of recurring revenue before anyone opens the dashboard.
Operanse works with WooCommerce Subscriptions to learn how many renewals your store normally takes, and how many normally fail, for each hour of the week. When tonight looks different, you hear about it.
Retries are counted apart from first attempts, so the numbers say what actually happened. And a queue that has quietly stopped charging anyone is noticed too, even though it produces no error.
Free Watch alerts you when most renewals are failing. Comparisons with your store’s normal, stalled renewals, Stripe reasons and revenue estimates require Monitor ($39 USD/site/month) or Insight ($99). Your trial includes 14 days of Insight.
Illustrative. One week of failed first-attempt renewals, drawn against the store’s own normal for each hour. Early on Saturday a renewal batch fails; retries are counted apart.
Renewal problems are quiet by design.
A batch fails
A payment gateway update, a changed API key or a gateway outage lands just before the night’s renewals. Most of them fail. The shop looks fine to anyone who visits.
Renewals stop running
WP-Cron or Action Scheduler stalls. The queue grows and nobody is charged. No error appears anywhere, because nothing ran.
The same few customers fail every month
Their saved card or Stripe customer link is broken, often after a migration or a gateway switch. Each retry fails again until someone repairs the saved details.
Retries blur the picture
A failed renewal is retried several times. Raw failure counts then look worse, or better, than the truth, and a real problem is easy to dismiss.
What Operanse watches
Renewal failures against your normal
Operanse learns how many renewals your store attempts and how many fail, hour by hour across the week. An unusual rise in failures, or in the failure rate, is reported within about 30 minutes.
Only first attempts decide the failure rate. Retries are counted on their own and never twice, so a retry run does not look like a new outage.
Renewals that did not happen
Far fewer renewal attempts than your store normally makes at that hour is an alert of its own. A stalled queue is noticed without waiting for an error that will never come.
The queue behind the renewals
Renewals are run by Action Scheduler. Operanse watches it for tasks running late, tasks stuck mid-run and tasks failing, and notices when WP-Cron is not running.
Why Stripe refused a renewal
With the official WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway plugin, ordinary declines are counted, while a broken saved customer or payment method, or a store configuration fault, is reported from the first affected order with the order numbers and what to repair. Stripe monitoring
The revenue affected and what changed
Each incident shows the estimated revenue affected, alongside plugin, theme and setting changes made shortly before it began. A nearby change gives you a place to start; it is not proof of the cause.
An alert you can act on at 3 am, or at 8
Illustrative alert. Store name, counts, times and amounts are examples.
31 of 38 renewals failed on their first attempt between 02:00 and 03:00 (82%). Usual for this hour: 3 to 9%.
Estimated revenue affected: $1,840.
Changed shortly before: WooCommerce Stripe Gateway updated, 01:12.
One cause is one alert. Thirty more failed renewals for the same reason do not send thirty more messages.
Alerts go by email and Slack. Critical alerts also go by SMS and WhatsApp, according to your alert settings and plan limits. On Insight, each critical alert includes an AI review with a likely cause and the evidence for it.
Keep the emails WooCommerce Subscriptions sends. Add the context.
WooCommerce Subscriptions already emails the store about failed renewals and retries. Those emails are useful, one renewal at a time.
What they do not do is compare tonight with a normal night, separate first attempts from retries, notice that renewals did not run at all, or tell an ordinary decline from a broken saved customer. That is the part Operanse adds.
Clear limits on what Operanse does
It never changes a subscription
It does not retry, charge, pause or edit anything. It tells you what needs attention and what to check.
Stripe reasons need the official Stripe plugin
Other gateways, including PayPal, Square and WooPayments, still get renewal counts, failure rates, retries kept apart and revenue estimates, without the gateway’s reason for each failure.
Monthly renewals take a cycle to learn
Learning a weekly pattern takes about two weeks. If most of your renewals fall on a monthly date, allow a full month before “normal for this night” is reliable. The free check below needs no learning at all.
No card numbers. No customer details.
Operanse counts renewals, failures and retries, and records order numbers and short failure codes. It never collects card details, customer names or email addresses.
The agent is read-only. There is no capability for Operanse to change your site. Security
It won’t slow your checkout down
During a visitor’s page view, the agent appends one line to a local file. It makes no database query and no call to Operanse. Measured PHP overhead is about 0.02 ms per page view. Pages served from cache never load it. How it’s measured
If Operanse is unreachable, your store and its renewals carry on as normal. Nothing waits on it.
Connect your store in four steps
Create an account at app.operanse.com and add your store.
In WordPress, go to Plugins → Add New, search Operanse, and install Operanse Agent.
Paste the one-time pairing token into the agent’s settings page.
There is nothing to configure for WooCommerce Subscriptions. The agent notices it is installed and starts counting renewals.
The free failing-renewals check and the Stripe fault reports work from the first night. Comparisons with your store’s normal start telling you things on day three.
Choose how much you want to see
| Plan | Price per live site | Relevant renewal monitoring |
|---|---|---|
| Watch | Free, no end date | An email alert when renewals are failing: of the renewal orders created in the last 6 hours, at least 5, with 80% or more failed. Also alerts when scheduled tasks pile up or keep failing. No comparison with your store’s normal, stalled-renewal alerts, Stripe reasons or revenue estimates. |
| Monitor | $39 USD/month | Renewal failures and failure rates against your normal, retries kept apart, renewals that did not run, the Action Scheduler queue, Stripe reasons with the official plugin, revenue estimates and recent site changes. Email, Slack, SMS and WhatsApp alerts, unlimited users and 30 days of history. |
| Insight | $99 USD/month | Everything in Monitor, plus an AI review with each critical alert, with 6 reviews per site per day included. Also includes 90 days of history, higher SMS and WhatsApp limits, and server resource monitoring. |
The free check is set high on purpose: replayed against three real stores’ normal days, it would not have fired once. It is there for the night most renewals fail, not for a small rise.
Annual billing costs 10 times the monthly price: 2 months free. Organisations with 10 or more sites get 20% off every site. Staging and development copies are free on paid plans.
Try Insight for 14 days without a credit card. If you do not choose a paid plan, your account moves to Watch and its free checks continue. Pricing in full
Frequently asked questions
Will the free plan tell me if renewals fail?
Yes. Watch emails you when, of the renewal orders created in the last 6 hours, at least 5 exist and 80% or more failed. Smaller rises against your store’s normal need Monitor or Insight.
Does it count retries as failures?
No. Only first attempts decide the failure rate. Retries are counted on their own, so one failing renewal retried four times is not five failures.
Can it tell me if renewals stopped running?
Yes, on Monitor and Insight. Far fewer renewal attempts than your store normally makes at that hour is an alert in itself, and the Action Scheduler queue behind the renewals is watched for tasks running late or failing.
Does it change my subscriptions?
Never. It does not retry, charge, pause or edit a subscription, and the agent has no capability to change your site.
Which payment gateways does it work with?
All gateways get renewal counts, failure rates, retries kept apart and revenue estimates. Stripe failure reasons need the official WooCommerce Stripe Payment Gateway plugin.
Doesn’t WooCommerce Subscriptions already email me about failed renewals?
It does, one renewal at a time. Operanse adds whether tonight is unusual for your store, which failures are retries, renewals that never ran, the money affected and what changed shortly before.
Know about a bad renewal night before your customers do.
Start free, or see everything with 14 days of Insight. No card.
WooCommerce is a trademark of Automattic Inc. Operanse is not affiliated with or endorsed by Automattic or WooCommerce.