What Is a Subscription Audit? A Guide for DTC Subscription Brands

A subscription audit is a structured review of how a subscription business wins, keeps and charges its subscribers. For a DTC brand it traces churn and weak unit economics back to their source across acquisition, the subscription offer, payments and retention data, and ranks the fixes by how much revenue each one is worth.

What does a subscription audit cover?

Acquisition. Which channels and first-order offers bring in subscribers who stay, and which bring in people who cancel after the discount ends. Cohorts are compared by source and by offer.

The subscription offer. Delivery cadence against how fast people use the product, pricing and tiers, and how easy it is to skip, swap or pause instead of cancelling.

Payments. Failed renewal rate, how many failures are recovered, retry logic, dunning, and whether account updaters and network tokens are switched on.

Retention data. Cohort decay curves, cancellation reasons, and how voluntary and involuntary churn split.

Unit economics. LTV built from real cohorts, LTV:CAC and CAC payback by channel.

Compliance. For UK brands, readiness for the DMCCA's subscription rules: pre-contract information, reminder notices, cooling-off and easy exit.

What is a subscription health check?

A subscription health check is a lighter version of an audit. It looks at the headline numbers (churn by cohort, failed payment recovery and LTV:CAC) to show whether a deeper review is worth doing. Some brands use it as a first step before committing to a full audit.

When should a DTC brand get a subscription audit?

The common triggers are churn rising without an obvious cause, paid acquisition getting more expensive while subscriber numbers stall, a planned move between subscription platforms, a price rise, preparation for fundraising or a sale, and the DMCCA rules coming into force for UK brands. An audit before a platform migration or a price change costs less than fixing the damage afterwards.

Who carries out subscription audits?

FILDI runs subscription audits for DTC and Shopify subscription brands, directly and through agency partners. The work is led by Craig Niven, who spent 15 years in subscriptions at Sky, BT, News Corp, Future, ESPN, the NFL and Tennis TV. You can book a free 30-minute call to talk through whether an audit fits your situation.

What does a subscription audit produce?

A useful audit ends with a short list of changes ranked by revenue impact, each tied to the evidence behind it. It should say where churn starts, what that churn costs, and which fix to make first. A long list of observations with no priority order is not much use to a team with limited time. Our churn guide covers the upstream causes an audit usually finds.