Stripe's dashboard shows you a lot of numbers. Most of them aren't the ones you should be watching.
Here are the five metrics that actually matter for indie founders and small SaaS businesses — what they mean, how to calculate them, and what to do when they look bad.
1. Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
What it is: The normalised monthly revenue from all active subscriptions.
Why it matters: Total revenue is a vanity metric. MRR tells you what you can reliably expect to earn every month, which is what determines whether your business is sustainable.
How to find it: Stripe doesn't show MRR directly. You have to calculate it by summing all active subscriptions and normalising annual/quarterly plans to monthly. See our full guide on how to calculate MRR from Stripe.
What to watch for: Is MRR growing month over month? Even 5–10% monthly growth compounds dramatically over a year.
2. Churn Rate
What it is: The percentage of customers who cancel in a given month.
Why it matters: Churn is a leak in your bucket. No matter how much new revenue you add, if churn is high enough it all drains away. A 5% monthly churn rate means you're replacing nearly half your customer base every year.
How to calculate it:
Churn rate = (Customers lost this month / Customers at start of month) × 100
What's healthy: Under 2% monthly is excellent. 2–5% is acceptable. Over 5% means retention should be your priority over acquisition.
What to do when it's high: Talk to every customer who cancels. Send a one-line email asking why. The answers will tell you exactly what to fix.
3. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)
What it is: The total revenue you can expect from a customer over their entire relationship with you.
Why it matters: LTV tells you how much you can afford to spend to acquire a customer. If your LTV is $100, you can't spend $80 on ads to acquire a customer and expect a sustainable business.
How to calculate it:
LTV = Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) / Monthly Churn Rate
So if your average customer pays $20/month and your churn rate is 4%, your LTV is $20 / 0.04 = $500.
What to watch for: Is your LTV growing over time? Increasing LTV usually means either higher ARPU (upsells, price increases) or lower churn (better retention).
4. Net New MRR
What it is: New revenue added minus revenue lost in a given month.
Why it matters: Total MRR tells you where you are. Net new MRR tells you which direction you're moving and how fast.
How to calculate it:
Net new MRR = New MRR + Expansion MRR − Churned MRR
- New MRR: revenue from new subscribers this month
- Expansion MRR: revenue from existing customers who upgraded
- Churned MRR: revenue lost from cancellations
What to watch for: Positive net new MRR means you're growing. Negative means churn is outpacing new revenue — a problem that compounds quickly.
5. Active Subscriber Count
What it is: The number of customers currently paying you.
Why it matters: It grounds your revenue numbers in human reality. 50 customers at $20/month means something very different than 1 customer at $1,000/month, even though both are $1,000 MRR. Your concentration risk is completely different.
What to watch for: Growth trend month over month. Also watch for unusually large single customers — if one customer represents more than 20% of your MRR, their churning could be devastating.
Tracking these metrics
You can pull all five of these from Stripe manually using the API or CSV exports, but it's tedious and error-prone. A few options:
Build your own dashboard. If you're technical, you can build a script that queries the Stripe API and calculates these numbers. It takes a few hours and you'll need to handle edge cases like annual plans, pagination, and trial subscriptions.
Use a dedicated tool. Metricsly connects to Stripe via read-only OAuth and calculates all five of these metrics automatically. It updates daily and sends a weekly email digest so you always know your numbers. Starts at $19.99/month — a lot less than building and maintaining your own solution.
Spreadsheet. If you have fewer than 50 customers, a manually updated spreadsheet works fine. It breaks down at scale, but early on it's better than nothing.
The habit that matters
The specific tool doesn't matter as much as the habit. Check these five numbers once a week, minimum. Set up an alert when churn spikes. Know your MRR trend without having to look it up.
Founders who know their numbers make better decisions. That's it. There's no trick — just knowing whether things are getting better or worse, and why.