The subscription readiness checklist

Subscription revenue is wonderful right up until churn, failed payments, and support load quietly eat the margin. This checklist helps you find those gaps before your customers do.

It covers the four pillars of a subscription that holds: pricing and packaging, billing and dunning, retention and lifecycle, and the operational load behind the scenes.

Use it to decide whether you're ready to launch recurring revenue — or what to fix first so it compounds instead of leaking.

1. Pricing & packaging

• Are your tiers built around outcomes the customer wants, not features you have?
• Is there an obvious reason to move up a tier?
• Do you know your target price-to-value ratio versus alternatives?
• Have you decided monthly vs. annual, and the incentive to choose annual?

2. Billing & dunning

• What happens when a card fails — do you retry, notify, and recover?
• Can customers upgrade, downgrade, and cancel without emailing you?
• Are proration and refunds handled cleanly?
• Do you have a clear, compliant cancellation flow?

3. Retention & lifecycle

• Do you know your activation moment — the point a new user "gets it"?
• Is there onboarding that gets them there fast?
• Do you measure churn, and do you know why people leave?
• What's your plan for the first 30, 60, and 90 days of a subscription?

4. Operational load

• Who handles billing questions and failed payments?
• Can your support load scale without your headcount scaling with it?
• Do your analytics, billing, and CRM agree on who's a paying customer?
• What breaks first if you 10× your subscribers tomorrow?

Score yourself honestly. Green across all four and you're ready; gaps tell you exactly what to fix first. Want a partner for the build? Book a call.