Chargebee says dunning starts before the decline. On Whop you get five days.

Chargebee published a guide to dunning management in July. Its argument is that most billing systems start at the retry and skip the stages on either side, so revenue that was never really at risk gets written off as churn. Chargebee splits recovery into four stages, Prevent, Retry, Recover, and Learn, and says tools that only do Retry leave money uncollected.

Half of that is not yours on Whop. Knowing which half saves you from looking for a lever that does not exist.

Whop owns the retry, and it runs for five days

Whop's docs are specific about what happens when a member's card declines. The membership status changes to past due, which is a grace period and does not immediately cancel access. Whop emails the member asking them to update their payment information. Whop retries the charge over a five-day period. If the payment still fails after five days, the subscription cancels automatically.

You get one setting. Under Dashboard, Settings, Checkout, there is a choice for whether members have access while past due. That toggle is the whole of your control over the retry stage.

You can see who is currently in it. Dashboard, Payments, filter Status to Past due.

The prevention stage is closed to you. The recovery stage is not.

Chargebee's prevention advice is an account updater that refreshes expiring and reissued cards before the charge date, plus routing each attempt through whichever gateway has the best authorization odds. You do not run the card vault on Whop and you do not pick the gateway. That section of the guide is not actionable for you.

What Chargebee calls Recover is entirely yours. Whop sends the member a payment-update email, and it reads like a billing notice, because that is what it is. If the member has not opened your community in three weeks, a billing notice is the wrong first contact from you, and right now it is the only contact they get.

Chargebee also recommends segmenting dunning by plan value so high-value accounts get a longer recovery runway. The five days is fixed on Whop, so that segmentation has to live in your outreach rather than the retry schedule. Your $200/month member and your $15/month member both get the same five days from Whop. They should not get the same message from you.

A declined card is not one problem

Whop publishes the decline reasons it returns, and they describe different situations. insufficient_funds is a member who wants the product and is short this week. That one usually clears on its own if the retry lands after payday. expired_card is a member who has not thought about your community since the card was issued, and it takes 30 seconds to fix once they see the message. lost_card and stolen_card mean the number is gone for good and no retry will ever succeed, so the five days is wasted and only a message will work. authentication_required means the bank wants the member to confirm, and the member has to be at their phone to do it.

Treating all four as one queue means you send the same nudge to someone who needs nothing and someone who needs a new card on file today.

What to do this week

Open Dashboard, Payments, and filter to Past due. Whatever is in there right now is on a five-day clock, and some of it started yesterday. Check the access-while-past-due setting while you are in there, because cutting access on day one and cutting it on day five are different products.

Then reach the past-due members directly, in your own voice, inside the window. Not a receipt. A short message that says the card did not go through and here is where to fix it. Members who were happy last week and have a dead card this week are the cheapest retention you will ever get, and they expire on a fixed schedule.

ChurnGuard scores failed payments as part of the health score, so a past-due member who was already going quiet ranks above one who is just having a bad card week, and both surface before the five days run out.

Chargebee's last stage is Learn, and it is the one nobody does. Write down how many past-due memberships you had this month and how many came back. Next month you will know whether any of this worked.