AutoPay is widely known among recurring revenue businesses as a powerful tool to avoid churn  - such an effective tool that companies will even invest in AutoPay as a promotion, discounting their prices to  customers as an incentive to sign up for it. The retention and revenue rewards reaped by AutoPay more than offset the cost of these incentives to customers.

But Autopay presents its own set of challenges.
 
AutoPay is not immune to payment failures and can even drive payments related churn, degrading the ROI of the program while directly contradicting its objective. Here are some of the ways in which AutoPay - sub-optimally managed - can hurt recurring revenue businesses.