They do different jobs. This page is about which one you actually need.
If you sell subscriptions through Paddle Billing, you already have failed payment recovery. Paddle retries the charge and emails the customer about it, and Retain is included in your Paddle account. So the honest question is not whether you need recovery. It is whether you need to control what the recovery says.
| Paddle Retain | Rescue | |
|---|---|---|
| Retries the failed charge | Yes, on its own schedule | No, and never will |
| Emails the customer | Yes | Yes |
| Who writes the email | Paddle's template | You do, once |
| Whose name it comes from | Paddle's sender | Yours |
| Your own sending domain | Not available | Optional, verified |
| Payment link | Included | Fetched at send time, never expired on arrival |
| Stops when they pay | Yes | Yes, on the payment webhook |
| Price | Paddle's help centre says a flat fee from $500/month for smaller companies, performance-based above that. Other Paddle pages say it is included with Billing at no extra cost. Ask them directly. | $49/month flat. No percentage of what you recover. |
Most sellers. If a recovery email arriving in Paddle's wording under Paddle's sender name does not bother you, there is nothing here worth paying for, and you should close this page.
That is also true if your subscriptions are low value. Recovering a $9/month plan more gracefully does not pay for a $49/month tool. The arithmetic only works above roughly $60 in monthly recurring revenue per recovered customer, and you can check that against your own numbers before you talk to us.
When the recovery email is the only message some customers will read that month, and it currently does not sound like you wrote it.
That matters most if you sell to businesses, if your price is high enough that a failed card is worth a real conversation, or if you have spent effort on a brand that a generic billing notice quietly undoes. Rescue sends four emails over five days in your text, from your sender name, optionally from your own verified domain, and stops the moment the payment goes through.
They run side by side. Retain decides when to charge again. Rescue decides what the customer is told while that happens. Turning Rescue on does not turn Retain off, and you should not turn Retain off: the retries are the part that actually recovers the money.
It does not retry charges. Paddle owns that schedule and racing it would mean two systems attempting the same card. It never touches your funds, your payouts, or card data, so there is no PCI scope and no financial licence involved. It reads payment events and sends email. That is the whole product.
Rescue works the same way for Lemon Squeezy sellers, with one difference worth knowing: Lemon Squeezy exposes no way to trigger a retry through its API at all. It runs four attempts over two weeks on its own. The emails are the only part anyone can control there, including us.
Setup is one API key and one webhook, and takes about two minutes. Full refund within 14 days, no conversation required.
New sellers pay $99 once founder pricing closes.