Butter Payments and FlyCode Alternatives for Non-Stripe Billing

Butter Payments and FlyCode both read your declines through Stripe. This post scores the alternatives on which ones can see declines from NMI, Authorize.net, an in-house billing system or several merchant IDs at once, then on decline-code awareness, account updater reach and pricing model.

Butter Payments and FlyCode both recover failed subscription payments. Both read your declines through Stripe. FlyCode installs from the Stripe App Marketplace and triggers retries inside Stripe Billing. Butter ships turnkey integrations for exactly three platforms: Stripe Billing, Braintree and Recharge. If you bill through NMI, Authorize.net, or a customer relationship management system (CRM) you built yourself, the useful question changes. It is not which tool times retries better. It is which tool can see your declined renewals at all. This post starts with that integration reality. It then scores the alternatives on decline-code-aware retries and on account updater reach across several merchant IDs (MIDs). It also asks whether you pay a share of recovered money or a flat monthly fee.

What Do Butter Payments and FlyCode Actually Do?

Both are failed-payment recovery layers. Each sits on top of a subscription biller and retries declined renewals on your behalf. Butter's Recover product is a machine-learning retry layer. It claims a top-line lift of 10% or more in annual recurring revenue (ARR). FlyCode reads decline codes, retimes retries and falls back to a backup payment method. FlyCode claims a 16 to 25 point lift in recovery rate.

Recovery has two halves, and the vendors split differently across them. A retry is the half the cardholder does not see: your biller charges the same credential again on a schedule. Dunning is the half the cardholder does see: an email, a text message (SMS) and an update-card page. Dunning is the layer for failures the cardholder has to fix. Butter runs both halves as one campaign through its Outreach product. Butter also ships PaymentScore for recoverability scoring and Dispute for chargeback reduction. We cover the retry half in failed payment recovery. We cover the outreach half in dunning management.

The competitive set a buyer meets on page one is wider than the two names in the query. FlyCode, Churn Buster, Churnkey, Redux Payments, Revaly (formerly FlexPay), Vindicia Retain, Paddle Retain and Baremetrics Recover all appear. Billing platforms that run their own retry engines appear too, such as Recurly, Chargebee and Zuora. Two of those names need care. FlexPay rebranded as Revaly on 5 November 2025, so older roundups score the same product under two names. Redux Payments is scoped to Stripe only.

Coverage and pricing are taken from each vendor's own published pages, read on 15 October 2026.

Why Do Both Tools Assume You Bill Through Stripe or Shopify?

The app store is the distribution channel, and the app store defines the integration. FlyCode describes installing in hours from the Stripe or Shopify app stores with no engineering work. Its published processor table lists six processors: Stripe, Braintree, PayPal through Braintree-vaulted methods, Adyen, Checkout.com and Shop Pay. Neither NMI nor Authorize.net appears on it.

Butter's published surface is narrower on the turnkey path and wider on the custom one. Its docs name exactly three turnkey subscription platforms: Stripe Billing, Braintree and Recharge. Butter routes every other stack to a build on its Enterprise API, the application programming interface (API) your engineers code against. That path carries a standard timeline of 4 to 6 weeks. Butter's own FAQ puts a rate on the rest: it adds new payment service providers (PSPs) and payment methods at about one a month. For an NMI or Authorize.net merchant, that support sits on the roadmap rather than in production today.

That build is not a connector you switch on. Butter's Enterprise API asks your system to forward both failed and successful payment events. It also asks your system to expose a Retry Status endpoint that Butter polls before each retry. Your system has to consume a Retry Result webhook as well. Your engineers own the work of making your declines visible. Butter also runs a pre-launch data ingestion period before it takes over retries. Going live and recovering money are therefore two different dates.

Which Recovery Tools Work With NMI, Authorize.net, or a Custom CRM?

Four names publish coverage below the billing-platform layer. Revaly (formerly FlexPay) lists roughly 87 gateways including Authorize.Net and both NMI entries. Vindicia Retain claims 60 or more providers and names NMI and Authorize.Net. Slicker lists Authorize.net but not NMI. sticky.io targets multi-gateway CRM billing.

Read those lists as the first filter and integration depth as the second. Revaly's recovery docs handle gateway-level quirks. NMI, for instance, represents a stored payment method by transaction ID rather than by a token. A billing-platform connector never has to think about that. Slicker executes retries through your own merchant accounts rather than its own, which keeps a multi-MID setup intact. Vindicia states plainly that it is not a processor or acquirer and that you keep your own processor relationships. That is why Vindicia can sit over several MIDs at once. We go deeper on splitting recovery across acquirers in recovering failed rebills across multiple MIDs. The scored category list lives in our failed payment recovery software roundup.

If your system of record is a CRM you bought or wrote, two shapes of answer apply. The plugin shape installs recovery inside the CRM and spans many MIDs at once. Konnektive's FlexPay plugin lists 16 supported processors, including Authorize.net, NMI, USA ePay, Vantiv and Payeezy. Churn Buster reaches Checkout Champ through a Decline Recovery plugin wired with an account ID, an API key and two webhooks. That plugin carries a documented sync lag of up to 20 minutes. The API shape asks you to answer three questions first. Who holds the card on file? Can your vault hand a token to an outside retry engine? What does that do to your scope under the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS)? Butter's cross-PSP Card Vault, for instance, requires you to integrate Butter at checkout and to supply PCI DSS attestation documentation. That is a payments project rather than an install.

How Long Does It Take to Get Recovery Live on Your Own MIDs?

Published timelines spread across three orders of magnitude, and the spread tracks integration shape rather than vendor quality. Churn Buster states about an hour with its team on the call. Butter claims 72 hours to live with two 30-minute calls when you already run a supported payment service provider. Butter claims 4 to 6 weeks on the Enterprise API path. FlexPay quotes a few hours for an already-integrated CRM. FlexPay also quotes as little as 3 days to add a gateway it does not yet support. It quotes 10 to 30 days to integrate a custom CRM through its API. Vindicia says days. Add one date no vendor controls. On Authorize.net the account updater batch starts on the 14th of the month at 00:00 UTC. Enable it after the 13th and your first updates land in the following month.

Do These Tools Replace Your Native Retries or Layer On Top of Them?

Both named tools aim to own the retry decision rather than append attempts to yours. FlyCode says it replaces Stripe Smart Retries instead of stacking on top. FlyCode criticizes tools that add attempts at the end of an existing flow. Two systems charging the same card on overlapping schedules can lower authorization rates and trigger soft blocks. That failure mode has a name: retry stacking.

The baseline they are both sold against is free and already decline-code aware. Stripe Smart Retries runs timed retries on Stripe Billing invoices, with a recommended default of 8 tries within 2 weeks. Its selectable windows run from 1 week to 2 months. It also suppresses nine hard decline codes rather than spending attempts on them. Turn Smart Retries off for a hand-built schedule and Stripe caps you at three custom retries. That cap is the gap a third-party layer sells into. The scheduling mechanics are in smart retry scheduling.

The baseline on your own rails is weaker, which raises the ceiling for any tool that can reach it. Authorize.net's native recurring-billing retry suspends the subscription on a declined renewal. It then re-attempts nightly at 2 am, but only after you have updated the payment information. So it never reads the decline code at all. Recurly does support Authorize.net. Recurly runs its own machine-learning retry engine with a ceiling of 20 attempts or 60 days from invoice creation. It also wires a credential refresh straight back into the retry. Price that in: Recurly charges 0.9% to 1.25% of all subscription revenue processed plus a platform fee from $249 a month. Recurly's dunning therefore costs you on total revenue rather than on recovered revenue.

What Should You Require on Decline Codes, Account Updater, and Multiple MIDs?

Require three things, in increasing order of difficulty. First, the tool reads the exact decline code rather than an approved or declined flag. Second, it reads Mastercard merchant advice codes (MACs), which carry the issuer's own retry interval. Third, it tells you which of your merchant IDs it can retry on. The card networks grant account updater reach per MID.

Decline-code awareness has a hard test. A network rule sets that test, not a preference. Visa's current rulebook is the 18 April 2026 edition, at Table 7-2, rule ID 0030640. It permits reattempts after Category 2, 3 and 4 declines up to 20 attempts in 30 days. Visa bars any resubmission on the same credential after a Category 1 decline: 04, 07, 12, 14, 15, 41, 43, 46, 57, R0, R1 and R3. A schedule-based retry on one of those codes breaches the rule on attempt one, and the fee applies to the attempt itself. Visa also moved response code 83 into Category 2 effective 25 July 2026. Retry logic written before mid-2026 does not classify it.

Use that rule as a cheap credibility test for any vendor. The ceiling was 15 attempts in 30 days through 24 May 2025, and it rose to 20 on 25 May 2025. Several current vendor explainers still print 15. A tool quoting 15 as today's Visa cap works from a superseded edition. That tells you how fresh its code mapping is. On the cost side, published reports put the excessive-attempt fee at $0.10 per domestic attempt. The cross-border figure rose from $0.15 to $0.25 on 25 April 2026. Visa does not publish that schedule, so your acquirer's pass-through is the number that lands on your statement.

Mastercard publishes no single count. It answers per transaction with a merchant advice code. MAC 01 means updated account information is available, so the next step is an account updater call rather than a retry. MAC 02 means try again later. MAC 03 means do not try again. MAC 24 through 30 each name an interval: 1 hour, 24 hours, 2, 4, 6, 8 or 10 days. Retry the same card and amount inside 30 days after MAC 03 or MAC 21 and you pay a fee. That fee runs $0.03 to $0.50 per transaction as of January 2025. A gateway stack creates a problem here. NMI's public response reference documents a 1, 2 or 3 status and response codes from 100 to 461. Some entries are as coarse as a transaction declined by the processor. The same reference documents no merchant advice code pass-through. A retry engine on NMI reasons from gateway codes rather than from issuer guidance.

Account updater reach is the requirement vendors are loosest about, because it is not theirs to sell. Visa Account Updater enrollment runs through your acquirer, and Visa qualifies each merchant individually. Mastercard registers its Automatic Billing Updater per MID. It uses the same merchant IDs you populate in data element 42 (DE 42) of the authorization request. Mastercard delivers updates only to pre-registered merchant entities. Run three MIDs across three acquirers and you have three enrollments to chase. No recovery vendor can pool them for you. Commercial card, prepaid, ATM-only and single-use virtual bank identification numbers (BINs) also sit outside Visa's issuer enrollment mandate. A business-card-heavy book therefore gets thinner coverage.

Yield is the figure to ask for: Authorize.net's datasheet reports about 15% of cards updating in month one and 3% to 5% a month after, while its feature page says 20% to 35% then 7% to 8%.

The last requirement is the one that quietly fails. Visa bars manipulating data elements on a reattempt. The rule explicitly covers the acquiring identifier, the acquirer and merchant country, and the MCC (the merchant category code that describes your business). Visa also names point-of-sale (POS) fields and the e-commerce indicator. That rules out cascading the same declined authorization onto a different MID to get a second answer. NMI's own multi-MID feature, ATRI, load balances by dollar amount or percentage across an unlimited number of MIDs. It attaches no decline-code logic. Routing and recovery are therefore separate jobs on that stack. Ask any vendor to show you per-MID recovery reporting before you sign.

Is Revenue Share or Flat Pricing Cheaper on Your Recovered Revenue?

Flat pricing wins above a break-even you can compute in one line. Churn Buster publishes $269 a month for one product and $430 a month for two. It takes no cut of recovered money. FlyCode's docs use a 10% rate in their worked example. Set 10% of recovered revenue equal to $269 and the crossover sits at $2,690 recovered per month.

Below that line the share costs less, and above it the flat fee costs less. FlyCode's own example is $10,000 recovered above baseline costing $1,000. Market rates for recovery vendors run 3% to 8% of recovered revenue, so run the arithmetic at your quoted rate rather than at 10%. Recover $5,000 a month and a 10% share costs $500, nearly double the $269 flat fee. Recover $1,350 a month and the same share costs $135, which is half of it.

Take a concrete case. Northshore Supply bills $100,000 in monthly recurring revenue through Authorize.net across two MIDs. About 9% of renewals fail each month, so about $9,000 of invoices land in recovery. Assume a recovery-rate lift of 15 to 20 points, the range a flat-fee vendor uses in its own math. That lift returns $1,350 to $1,800 a month. At a 10% share Northshore pays $135 to $180. The share stays the cheaper model until its recovered total passes $2,690 a month. The failure rate and the lift range are the vendor's assumptions, not ours.

Your ability to price any of this before a sales call splits the field. Churn Buster publishes its rate card and frames the fee as about 1% of failed-payment volume. You can check that number against your own report tonight. FlyCode publishes a worked example and charges on lift above your existing baseline, which makes the baseline definition the negotiation rather than the rate. Butter sets its percentage after a free payment health analysis and publishes no figure. You cannot compare Butter without entering sales. Price two other shapes as well. Reports put Paddle Retain at about 10% to 15% of recovered revenue. Recurly charges 0.9% to 1.25% of all subscription revenue plus a platform fee from $249 a month.

How Do You Run a Holdout That Proves Approval Lift, Not Just Retry Timing?

Split live failed payments 50/50 into a control arm running your current logic and a treatment arm running the vendor, at the same time. A before-and-after comparison conflates vendor performance with seasonality and billing-cycle timing. Then read the result at day 30 rather than at day 7, so better timing cannot pass itself off as better approval.

1. Exclude Visa Category 1 volume from both arms before you randomize, because a control arm that does nothing stays compliant while a treatment arm that retries those codes does not, and mixing them contaminates the denominator.
2. Run an A/A phase first: if both arms recover at the same rate under identical conditions the split is sound, and if they do not, any later lift is an artifact of a split that sorted by MID, plan price or billing day.
3. Stratify by failure type, amount and MID, since insufficient-funds, generic and expired-card declines recover at structurally different rates and approval rates differ by acquirer.
4. Hold account updater coverage constant across both arms, which on Authorize.net means randomizing the retry layer only, because its monthly batch cannot be scoped to selected profiles.
5. Fix one denominator for both arms, either recovered divided by all failed charges or recovered divided by attempted recoveries, and state in the result which one you used.
6. Read at day 30 and net the per-attempt fees out of incremental recovered revenue, because the treatment arm typically consumes more attempts than the control arm.
7. Report a p-value and a confidence interval rather than a recovery-rate percentage on its own.

Volume gates all of this. Most tests need 2,000 to 5,000 failed payments a month to push a p-value below 0.05. The exact number depends on the lift you expect and the variance in your subscriber mix. Below that volume a holdout will not resolve a few-point approval difference. Churnkey publishes an implementation you can copy. It assigns failed payments at random to variant A or B. It uses recovery rate as the single primary metric. It reads the outcome with a two-proportion z-test at 95% confidence and a 0.05 threshold. Churnkey says most tests need several weeks and several thousand failed payments. To compare three vendors at once, put the randomizer upstream of each retry, in your billing platform or your warehouse. It has to route invoice IDs to arms before any attempt fires.

Read-window discipline separates approval lift from reshuffling. 13% of failed invoices recover in days 14 to 21, and recovery is slight after day 21. A day-7 read therefore rewards whichever arm retried sooner. One calendar note matters for a test starting now. Visa enables its Credential Enrichment Service by default on 30 October 2026. That default covers card-on-file token requestors in the US, Canada, and Visa's Asia Pacific (AP) and Central Europe, Middle East and Africa (CEMEA) regions. It lands mid-test on both arms at once.

Which Option Fits Which Kind of Subscription Business?

Match the tool to where your declines live rather than to the feature grid. If Stripe Billing is your system of record, the Stripe-native cluster (FlyCode, Butter, Redux Payments) is the fastest path. Stripe Smart Retries at 8 tries in 2 weeks is the free control you should measure them against. If you run Shopify subscription apps such as Recharge, Skio or Loop, Churn Buster and FlyCode both publish those connectors. If you bill through NMI, Authorize.net or a CRM, the shortlist narrows to Revaly, Vindicia Retain, sticky.io, and Slicker for Authorize.net specifically. FlyCode even names the cases where it is the wrong pick. Those cases include one-time purchases, a merchant-of-record stack such as Paddle, and an existing Recurly billing customer. They also include a $100M or larger direct-to-consumer business on Braintree with its own payments team.

• Confirm your biller can send a real-time notification the moment a renewal fails, which is the first of the three capabilities FlyCode says a platform has to expose.
• Confirm the vendor can read your stored payment methods and subscription state, not just an approved or declined flag.
• Confirm the vendor can trigger a retry and write the invoice status back into your system of record.
• Ask which field the retry decision reads: the gateway response code, the network decline code, or the Mastercard merchant advice code.
• Ask the vendor to point at a published integration page naming NMI or Authorize.net, rather than an assurance in an email.
• Count your merchant IDs and ask who enrolls each one in Visa Account Updater and Mastercard Automatic Billing Updater, since that work sits with the acquirer.
• Get the pricing basis in writing: a share of gross recovered money, a share of lift above a baseline, or a flat monthly fee.
• Agree the holdout design before you sign, with concurrent arms, stratification by MID and failure type, and a read at day 30.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Butter Payments pricing a revenue share?

Yes. Butter charges a percentage of the revenue on each invoice it recovers, with no retainer and no published rate card. The percentage is set per merchant after a free payment health analysis, so you cannot compare it against a flat monthly fee until you are already in a sales conversation.

What's the main difference between Churn Buster and Butter Payments?

Pricing shape and integration reach. Churn Buster charges a flat monthly fee set by MRR tier, from $269 a month, and takes no cut of recovered money, while Butter takes a share of each recovered invoice. Churn Buster also lists 16 subscription platforms including Checkout Champ, where Butter's turnkey list is three.

Do failed payment recovery tools replace Stripe Smart Retries?

Some replace it and some stack on top of it, and the difference matters to your approval rate. FlyCode states that it replaces Stripe Smart Retries rather than adding attempts after them, because two systems charging the same card on overlapping schedules can lower authorization rates. Stripe's own default is 8 tries within 2 weeks.

Does Butter Payments email customers about failed payments?

Yes, through a separate product rather than through its retry engine. Butter ships four products: Recover for retries, Outreach for consolidated retries plus customer messages, PaymentScore for recoverability scoring and Dispute for chargeback reduction. Retries alone do not contact the cardholder, so outreach is the layer for failures the cardholder has to fix.

How much revenue can I expect to recover from failed payments?

Expect a figure closer to the low teens than to vendor headlines. Across 119 typical US B2B SaaS companies using Baremetrics Recover in May 2026, the median attempted recovery rate was 12.7%, against the 50% to 80% vendors quote for recoverable soft declines. Most of the difference is how the denominator is defined.

What does a failed payment recovery tool cost per month?

Flat-fee tools publish numbers: Churn Buster starts at $269 a month for one product and $430 a month for two, and Churnkey starts at $250 a month billed yearly under $5,000 of monthly churn. Revenue-share vendors typically take 3% to 8% of recovered revenue, quoted per merchant after a review.