Sometimes a direct debit does not go through. The account is empty, the card has expired, the bank says no. It happens to every business that takes recurring payments.
The plugin handles this properly, and you do not have to do anything.
What happens, step by step
The charge fails. Mollie tells your website.
Your customer keeps their access. They are not cut off immediately, and they may not even notice.
Mollie retries automatically. This often works. A salary lands, the account is topped up, and the second attempt goes through.
A grace period runs. By default, three days.
If a retry succeeds during those days, everything carries on as if nothing happened. Your customer keeps their access, the money arrives, and the failure is forgotten.
If nothing succeeds by the end of the grace period, two things happen. Your customer’s access ends. And the Mollie subscription is cancelled, so no further attempts are made.
That last part matters. Endlessly retrying a payment on someone who cannot pay is bad for them, bad for you, and irritating for their bank.
Changing the grace period
Go to Mollie Payments, then the Options tab, and find Subscription and expiry.
The setting is called Grace period after failed recurring charge, and the plugin describes it exactly: days to keep access active while Mollie retries a failed automatic charge. After this period, access ends.
The default is 3 days.
Should you change it?
Three days suits most businesses. It is long enough for a bank retry to land, and short enough that you are not giving away weeks of service for free.
Make it longer if your customers are businesses with slow accounting departments, or if your packages are expensive enough that losing one hurts more than a few extra days of access.
Make it shorter only if you have a real reason. Cutting someone off the moment a payment bounces is a good way to lose a customer over a temporary problem with their bank, and most failed payments are exactly that.
What your customer experiences
They get emailed. They see what happened. They can fix it.
Most failed renewals are not a customer trying to leave. They are a customer whose card expired. Treat them accordingly, and you keep them.