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How Health and Fitness Brands Can Reduce Subscription Churn
Try having monthly membership payments be as consistent as a gym routine. For subscription-driven fitness and health businesses, even the most minor billing issue can create involuntary subscription churn.
Health and fitness subscriptions are everywhere, including gyms, GLP-1 and weight loss programs, telehealth services, supplements, wearable-driven apps, and at-home fitness programs. “New year, new me,” often leads to a spike in signups, trials, and recurring subscription payments—along with new risks of subscription churn.
Product teams in this space feel the impact first. When a card expires, or a PSP throttles a category like weight loss or supplements, all of a sudden your roadmap shifts from “improve retention” to “patch billing failures” and “reducing subscription churn.”
A healthy payment stack stays ahead of these types of surprises before they disrupt growth plans.
As your team obsesses over engagement and retention, involuntary churn can start with a failed payment or an outdated credit card. Consider the idea of “payment wellness” to treat your payment workflows like your customers treat their health.
Payment Wellness Checklist: How to Reduce Subscription Churn
Nearly all gyms, fitness clubs, digital health and wellness apps, or HSA/FSA-enabled merchants operate on subscription or recurring revenue. Many offer “wellness checks” before getting started or to incentivize signing up.
Do the same with your payment stack. A payment wellness check starts with a few foundational questions every product team should be able to answer:
- How do we keep cards on file updated?
- How do we avoid prolonged migrations when we add another PSP?
- How do we control routing across products, geographies?
If answers to these questions are unclear or hard to come by, it’s the payment equivalent of showing up to the gym without sneakers.
- If a card-on-file expires, gets replaced, or is closed, you wasted the marketing budget and acquisition spend.
- BIN changes with new card issuers and products, like GLP-1 categories, lead to increased support tickets and customer frustration.
- Failed merchant-initiated transactions (MITs) for memberships or refills create involuntary subscription churn.
Product managers should treat these not as isolated billing events, but as risks to retention, NPS, and operational efficiency. For most fitness and health apps, recovering Customer Acquisition Costs (CAC) takes multiple billing cycles. Payment failures lead to subscription churn, and the economics of the product break. PMs end up compensating with retention experiments that mask the real issue: billing performance.
Building a Strong Core
The core of modern payments infrastructure starts with an independent token vault. A token vault is a PCI-compliant service that securely stores and tokenizes sensitive payment data. It sits before any individual processor, giving your team control over payment data instead of locking it in a single PSP’s environment. Just like a strong core keeps the body aligned and stable, an independent vault forms a secure payment foundation that is built to scale.
A token vault typically comes with features such as access controls, audit logging, strong authentication, and the ability to track token transactions. Token vaults use a combination of encryption to protect data in motion, and tokenization to protect data at rest.
Payment service providers (PSPs) will offer tokenization systems and token vaults. Their vaults create processor-specific tokens that cannot be used elsewhere. A vendor-neutral vault creates different token types to work with any PSP or partner, while also giving your team full ownership of the payment data. This is an advantage that becomes essential as you expand into new geographies, product lines, or payment methods.
Vendors who wish to use multiple PSPs will opt to use a third-party token service provider like Basis Theory. This way, the vendor owns the raw data, but returns a token that can be routed to the PSP of their choice. All the while, the underlying data remains in a non-proprietary location that is accessible but not owned.
This foundation creates the opportunity for payment optimization, dramatically reducing the risk of data breaches along with the cost of PCI compliance. Engineering overhead is reduced and PCI scope is contained—ensuring you can test new processors without rewriting subscription logic or migrating cards.
Keeping Subscriptions Healthy
A key feature for subscription platforms and merchants is known as Account Updater. Account Updater is one of the most effective tools for reducing involuntary subscription churn. It will automatically refresh stored card details when a customer gets a new card or card numbers change. This works well, especially for MITs like monthly memberships or auto-refills, such as:
- Membership renewals at boutique studios.
- Telehealth plans that require continuous billing.
- Supplement subscriptions with HSA/FSA re-billing.
By having Account Updater run at the vault level, and not processor-by-processor, the merchant only has to integrate once and the vault coordinates updates programmatically across all of the PSPs. Business logic and routing remain untouched because you are not hard-coding Account Updater behavior to a specific processor.
This protects continuity of care for GLP-1 and telehealth providers by reducing preventable payment failures that interrupt treatment plans.
Ask your team:
- Are we using an Account Updater service?
- Is it tied to a specific PSP?
- Do we know our involuntary churn rate from payment failures?
Having Account Updater running at the vault level helps avoid the overhead fees and inconsistency of each PSP doing its own version. Plus, it's cheaper.
Having Healthy Payment Workflows
Many merchants and platforms start with a single PSP and a simple subscription model. As growth accelerates, product teams often outgrow a single, full-service PSP and face challenges when scaling, like:
- Regional authorization rate differences.
- Processor restrictions on supplements, GLP-1, or virtual health.
- Need to route by product, geography, merchant type, or risk tier.
- International expansion or physical device subscriptions.
With a vault-first approach, adding a processor becomes a configuration update—not a data migration, re-collection effort, or multi-week engineering project. This type of design helps product teams launch new features or products without revisiting earlier architectural decisions.
If subscriptions drive your business, payment workflows deserve the same attention as your product roadmap. A vault-first strategy ensures you can scale into new regions, add higher-risk products, and launch new revenue models without card migrations or billing surprises.
Get a free payment wellness check with our team to identify hidden risks, and see how vault-first architecture can reduce involuntary subscription churn to future-proof your growth.
