/competitive-analysis

Before designing a feature in a well-trodden domain, look at how 2–4 mature companies handle it. Faster than inventing. More robust than guessing. Cite every source — never copy product copy or terms-of-service language.

When to use

• Designing billing, dunning, refunds, plan changes, trials, onboarding.
• Designing RBAC, workspace management, team invitations.
• Designing notifications, digests, preferences.
• Designing API rate limits, pagination, idempotency, error formats.
• Designing search, filters, saved views.
• Designing data export, deletion, retention.
• Stuck on UX for a non-obvious flow (account merging, plan downgrade, account recovery).

When NOT to use

• The user's domain is unique enough that competitor patterns won't transfer (specialized B2B verticals, regulated industries with custom workflows).
• The user has already decided. Don't second-guess; just ship.
• Style and copy decisions — those are taste, not pattern.

Operating method

1. Confirm the question

Ask the user, in one round:

• What's the specific problem? Not "how does Stripe work" but "how should we handle a failed-payment retry schedule and the user-facing dunning emails?"
• What's our context? B2C / B2B / SMB / enterprise / specific vertical. Self-serve vs sales-led. Plan structure.
• What constraints are non-negotiable? Compliance, no-third-party-data, must-self-host, etc.
• Which competitors should I look at? If unsure, suggest 3–4 mature ones in the relevant space.

Don't research without these answers. Researching the wrong question wastes a few minutes; acting on the wrong research costs a quarter.

2. Pick competitors deliberately

Mature comparison sets by domain (suggest these as defaults; adjust per user):

Domain	Suggested competitors
SaaS billing & dunning	Stripe, Recurly, Chargebee, Paddle
B2B SaaS workspace + RBAC	Linear, Notion, Slack, Asana
CRM	Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Close
E-commerce checkout	Shopify, Stripe Checkout, BigCommerce, WooCommerce
Marketplace fees + payouts	Stripe Connect, Airbnb, Etsy, Uber
Customer support	Intercom, Zendesk, HelpScout, Front
Project management	Linear, Jira, Asana, Monday
ERP financials	NetSuite, SAP, Odoo, Microsoft Dynamics
Inventory	Shopify, NetSuite, Cin7, Brightpearl
Auth / SSO	Auth0, Clerk, WorkOS, Okta
Notifications / engagement	Customer.io, Braze, Iterable, Knock
Webhooks / events	Stripe, GitHub, Segment
Analytics	Mixpanel, Amplitude, PostHog, Segment
Search	Algolia, Elasticsearch, Typesense, Meilisearch
Status / incidents	StatusPage, Statuspal, Better Uptime

3. Research each competitor

For each:

1. Read their public docs for the specific feature. Use firecrawl-scrape MCP if available. Quote with attribution.
2. Find dev-blog posts, conference talks, engineering decisions. These reveal why not just what.
3. Read 1–2 critical reviews (G2, ProductHunt, Reddit, HN) to find the friction points.
4. Note the version / date. Patterns evolve; a 2019 blog post may not reflect 2026 behavior.

4. Extract the dimensions that matter

Don't write narrative comparisons. Build a table where each row is a decision point and each column is a competitor.

For billing failure-recovery:

Dimension	Stripe Smart Retries	Recurly	Chargebee	Paddle
Retry count	4 (default)	configurable 1–5	configurable 1–10	3
Retry window	15 days	21 days	configurable	14 days
Retry timing	ML-optimized	fixed cadence	fixed/custom	fixed
Email cadence	day 1, 3, 7	day 1, 5, 10, 15	per template	day 1, 7
Grace period	bills marked past_due	suspend after final retry	configurable	suspend
Customer self-rescue	customer_portal	hosted page	hosted page	hosted page
Card update prompt	yes, in-product	yes, hosted	yes	yes
3DS / SCA handling	re-auth at retry	re-auth at retry	re-auth at retry	re-auth

5. Recommend with reasoning

End the analysis with: which patterns to adopt, which to skip, and why for this specific project. Cite the dimensions that drove the call.

## Recommendation for <project>

Adopt:
- Stripe's smart-retry timing (proven at scale, easy via Stripe Billing).
- Recurly-style dunning email cadence (more touchpoints than Stripe; better for our SMB churn profile).

Skip:
- Customer portal self-rescue (we'll wait for v2 — not enough users to justify yet).

Open question for the user:
- Grace period: do we want past_due → readonly access (Stripe default) or past_due → fully-featured for 7 days then suspend? Affects our retention math.

6. Save the research

Write the result to .claude/memory/reference/competitive-analysis-<topic>-<date>.md so future sessions don't re-research the same thing. Add to MEMORY.md.

Output format

## Question
<the user's actual question, refined>

## Context
- Business type:
- Constraints:
- Competitors compared:

## Comparison

[Table — one row per dimension, one column per competitor]

## Patterns worth borrowing
- <pattern A> — used by: <competitors>. Why: <reason>.
- <pattern B> — used by: <competitors>. Why: <reason>.

## Patterns to skip
- <pattern> — used by: <competitor>. Why we don't: <reason>.

## Recommended approach
[2–4 paragraphs. What you'd build, citing competitor patterns by name where you adopted them.]

## Open questions for the user
1. …
2. …

## Sources
- [Stripe docs — Smart Retries](https://...)
- [Recurly engineering blog — Dunning](https://...)
- [HN discussion: SaaS dunning best practices](https://...)

Boundaries

• Cite every source. No "I read somewhere that …"
• Never copy product copy, terms-of-service text, or trademarked material. Learn from the approach, write your own copy.
• Note the date of every source. Stripe-2019 ≠ Stripe-2026.
• Don't recommend the most popular pattern — recommend the pattern that fits the project's constraints.
• Don't research private information. Public docs, blog posts, talks, public reviews only.
• Ask first if the user already has strong preferences; this skill is for when they want input, not when they've decided.