The subscription block
Every recurring contract, run as one loop - involuntary lapse recovered, the renewal priced fair, churn named before it completes.
The pain
“Churn arrives as a number at month end with no name on it. We lose customers to a failed card we never chased, and the renewal price goes out without anyone checking it is fair.”
Recurring revenue is a thousand small contracts, each renewing on its own clock, and the firm watches only the total. So a customer is lost to a failed payment nobody chased, and another to a renewal price nobody checked against the rules - and both surface as one number a month later, with no name on it. The signals that a contract is about to end - usage decaying, a cancellation flow started, a card declining - land in billing, in product, in service, and are never read together as what they are: a customer leaving. In insurance this is the policy renewal book; elsewhere, memberships, recurring plans and utility contracts.
What the block is
The object is the recurring contract - one continuous picture per contract instance, across billing cycles from activation through each renewal to lapse, cancellation or win-back. The unit is the contract, not the relationship; one customer can hold several. Everything it produces feeds one live record: activations and billing cycles, payment behaviour, usage, renewal dates and prices, cancellation and win-back events. A model reads it permanently. Your billing, CRM and product systems stay exactly where they are - the block reads from them, it does not replace them.
The loop in action
Each output states what it saw, why it matters, what it recommends, and how confident it is - every fact linked back to its source, in an order a retention lead can read and a regulator can examine.
You set the dial
Every capability has four positions: observe - it reads silently and measures its own accuracy; recommend - it surfaces the case and a proposed action to a named owner; draft - it prepares the action for a human signature; act - it executes within agreed bounds and logs everything.
Everything starts at observe. Promotion is earned on the measured record and reversed instantly if it doesn’t hold. Anything a customer receives - a price, a save offer, a win-back - sits behind a human gate for as long as your policy and the pricing rules require. The mechanics are the immune gate described in our framework.
How it lands
It starts narrow: one product or one renewal cohort, the block at observe against your own past outcomes. Nothing is replaced, nothing is migrated - the first signals flow from the billing and product systems you already run. From there it is a bounded engagement - blueprint, build, handover - and your team owns the result outright: the signal map, the judgement rules, the dial settings, the working loop.
The backtest
Take three past churns: one you saw coming, one lost to a failed payment you never chased, and one renewal whose price no one checked against the rules. What did your own record know, and when did you find out?
That is the first question the diagnostic answers. Take the ten-minute diagnostic, or write to hello@somai.studio.
Runs on our framework · related reading: Most AI spend never reaches the P&L