The moment it happens
Flag declined Paddle payments in Slack
When a card is declined, you see who it was, how much and why, once per transaction even while Paddle retries.
- Runs
- The moment it happens
- Apps
- Paddle
- AI
- Not needed
- Access
- read (customers, transactions); notification settings
Send this to your assistant
Create a ClickRuntime automation: when a Paddle payment fails, post the customer email, amount, currency and decline reason to #billing in Slack. Only alert once per transaction.
First time? Adding ClickRuntime to your assistant takes about two minutes.
Why use it
Why teams use this automation
A subscription business on Paddle sees a failed card payment as one line in a transactions list, easy to miss. Behind it is a customer whose card expired, whose bank blocked the charge or whose balance ran short. Paddle retries on its own schedule, but the customer is usually never told, and after the last retry the subscription lapses. That is revenue lost to an ordinary, fixable problem.
When Paddle reports a failed transaction, the request signature is verified first. The payments array is then read for the error_code, the customer_id is used to fetch the customer record, and Slack gets one message with who it was, the amount and the reason. A retry on the same transaction does not post a second time.
It is most useful for teams with a few hundred subscribers, where someone can still send a friendly note to a customer instead of waiting for dunning emails to do the work.
What you get out of it
Reach the customer before the last retry
Paddle keeps retrying for a while after a decline. A same-day message from your team asking the customer to update their card can save the subscription while there is still time, rather than after access has been cut.
The error code tells you what to say
An expired card needs a different note from a bank block or insufficient funds. Seeing the reason in the message means the person writing to the customer sends the right fix the first time.
Quiet, accurate alerts instead of noise
One post per transaction means a card retried three times does not flood the channel. Your team learns to trust that every message is a distinct customer worth a look, so it keeps getting read.
Keep involuntary churn from hiding
Customers who leave because a payment failed never chose to go. Surfacing each failure makes that churn visible in the same place the team talks, so it gets owned instead of blamed on pricing.
Spot a pattern across many declines
If several failures cite the same error in one afternoon, the channel shows it quickly. That can point to a processor or country-level issue worth raising with Paddle before it spreads.
How it works
What happens, step by step
When a Paddle payment fails, Paddle tells ClickRuntime straight away.
ClickRuntime checks the message really came from Paddle, reads why the payment failed and looks up the customer's email.
A message goes to your #billing Slack channel with the customer, the amount and the reason, such as "declined".
Before it runs live
- Connect Paddle
- Paste your automation's link into the other app's webhook settings
What you get
Build your own
Need it to work differently?
Your own rules
Conditions, thresholds, filters and exceptions, written the way you'd explain them to a colleague.
Any number of apps
One automation can read from one app and update several others. Over 248 apps are ready, and anything with an API works too.
AI where it helps
Summaries, classification, extraction and drafts use ClickRuntime's built-in AI, with no extra key.
On a schedule or on each event
Runs as often as every 5 minutes, or the moment an app sends an event, and keeps track of what it already handled.
Changes you can ask for
- Act only on the items that match your own rules, and skip the rest
- Add an AI step, for example to summarize, sort or draft a reply
- Add another app, for example also send it to Slack
- Combine it with other Paddle steps into one automation
Under the hood
The code that runs this automation
from clickruntime import on_event, credentials, http, state, notify
import hashlib, hmac
def paddle_signed(event):
parts = dict(p.split("=", 1) for p in event.header("Paddle-Signature").split(";"))
expected = hmac.new(credentials.secret("PADDLE_WEBHOOK_SECRET").encode(),
f"{parts['ts']}:{event.body}".encode(), hashlib.sha256).hexdigest()
return hmac.compare_digest(expected, parts["h1"])
@on_event
def handle(event):
if not paddle_signed(event):
return {"posted": False, "reason": "bad signature"}
txn = event.json["data"]
if state.get(f"alerted:{txn['id']}"):
return {"posted": False, "reason": "already alerted"}
customer = http.get(f"https://api.paddle.com/customers/{txn['customer_id']}",
headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {credentials.secret('PADDLE_API_KEY')}"}).json()["data"]
reason = next((p.get("error_code") for p in reversed(txn.get("payments", [])) if p.get("error_code")), "unknown")
amount = int(txn["details"]["totals"]["grand_total"]) / 100
notify.slack(f"💳 Payment failed: {customer['email']}, {txn['currency_code']} {amount:,.2f}, reason: {reason}",
channel="#billing")
state.set(f"alerted:{txn['id']}", True)
return {"transaction": txn["id"]}FAQ
Common questions
Which Paddle event triggers the alert?
What happens when Paddle retries and it fails again?
Does the message include the customer's email?
What permissions does it need?
Does it need AI?
How many runs does it use?
Can I change how it works?
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