Baremetrics vs ProfitWell Metrics
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentProfitWell Metrics compared with Baremetrics
Baremetrics is priced analytics with a dunning add-on, so it can both measure churn and chase failed cards from one vendor. ProfitWell Metrics measures for free and recovers nothing. If you want one bill covering analytics and recovery, Baremetrics is coherent; if you want the best free measurement and will pick a specialist recovery tool separately, Metrics plus Churnkey or Stunning is stronger and often cheaper.
Choose Baremetrics if
SaaS companies from roughly $100,000 ARR upward that need real subscription analytics for the board and for their own decisions, and would rather get dunning and cancellation surveys from the same vendor at a $129 add-on than run a separate retention subscription.
Choose ProfitWell Metrics if
Any subscription company from pre-revenue to roughly $2M ARR that needs trustworthy recurring revenue and churn reporting and has no budget line for analytics, plus larger companies who want a free second opinion on the numbers their billing provider reports.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Baremetrics | ProfitWell Metrics |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retention | Retention |
| Starting price | $75 per month, or $49 per month billed annually (Launch) (free trial) | $0 (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Tiered subscription banded by tracked ARR, with dunning and cancellation tooling sold as separate flat-fee add-ons rather than being included in any plan. | Free product with no seat, revenue, or feature gate. Paddle monetises the surrounding portfolio, principally billing as merchant of record and the paid Retain product. |
| Free plan | No | The entire product is free, including unlimited users, full historical backfill, segmentation, cohorts, benchmarking, and API access. |
| Free trial | A free trial is offered; the length is not published on the pricing page | Not applicable; the product itself is free |
| Best for | SaaS companies from roughly $100,000 ARR upward that need real subscription analytics for the board and for their own decisions, and would rather get dunning and cancellation surveys from the same vendor at a $129 add-on than run a separate retention subscription. | Any subscription company from pre-revenue to roughly $2M ARR that needs trustworthy recurring revenue and churn reporting and has no budget line for analytics, plus larger companies who want a free second opinion on the numbers their billing provider reports. |
| Setup time | Metrics are live within minutes of connecting a billing source, with historical data backfilled automatically. Recover takes longer but the vendor describes the whole setup as achievable in under a day: enable it, configure the drip campaign, add the in-app reminders, and customize the card capture form. | Under thirty minutes for the common case. Create an account, authorise a read-only connection to Stripe or your billing provider, and wait for the historical backfill to complete. Companies with custom billing pushing data through the API should budget a few days of engineering time instead. |
| Learning curve | Low for the analytics; anyone comfortable with SaaS metrics vocabulary will be productive immediately. The judgement call is in Recover's paywall configuration, where the grace period before you block a delinquent customer's access is a real decision with real customer-relationship consequences. | Low for anyone who already knows what MRR and net revenue retention mean, moderate for anyone who does not. The definitions used are standard, which is helpful when your investor asks how a number was calculated. |
| Platforms | Web app, Email reports, In-app banner and paywall embeds, Branded hosted payment widget, Slack | Web application, Email digests, API |
| Compliance | SOC 2, GDPR, PCI handled by the underlying payment processor | GDPR, Operated under Paddle's compliance posture as a merchant of record |
| Founded | 2013 | 2012 |
| Headquarters | United States | London, United Kingdom (Paddle); originally Boston, Massachusetts |
| Ownership | Owned by Xenon Partners | Owned by Paddle following the 2022 acquisition of ProfitWell |
Strengths and limitations
Baremetrics
Strengths
- Comprehensive subscription analytics with no data engineering, which for a company without an analyst is the whole value proposition.
- Splits voluntary from involuntary churn clearly, which is the diagnostic step every retention project should start with and most companies skip.
- Recover's ROI guarantee, crediting the difference if recovered revenue does not cover your whole account cost, is the strongest commercial term in this category.
- A seven-email dunning drip out to day 30 plus pre-expiry and annual renewal reminders is a longer and more thorough working window than most competitors run.
Limitations
- Retention tooling is not included in any plan. Both add-ons at $129 each mean a small company wanting the full stack pays roughly $333 a month.
- No free plan, which is a direct disadvantage against ChartMogul's free tier up to $10,000 MRR.
- Recover supports only Stripe, Braintree, and Recurly, a narrower list than the platform's analytics integrations, so some Baremetrics customers cannot use the dunning add-on at all.
- Cancellation Insights is a survey with offers rather than a real cancel-flow product: no deep segmentation, no A/B testing, and a much thinner offer catalogue than Churnkey.
ProfitWell Metrics
Strengths
- Free with no revenue cap, seat limit, or feature gate, which is unique in a category where the analytics tools alone start around $100 a month.
- Full historical backfill on connection means cohort and retention analysis works from day one rather than accruing over months.
- The voluntary versus involuntary churn split is the single most decision-useful number in retention, and this is the cheapest place to get it.
- Broad billing support across Stripe, Chargebee, Braintree, Recurly, Zuora, and Paddle, plus an API for homegrown billing.
Limitations
- It prevents nothing. There is no dunning, no retry logic, no cancel flow, and no offer engine. Every dollar it identifies as lost stays lost unless you buy something else.
- Owned by Paddle, a merchant of record that competes with Stripe. The product is not compromised by this, but the strategic incentive is real and the free tier carries no guarantee.
- Health scoring and churn prediction are thin next to a real customer success platform, and there is no playbook or task layer to act on what they surface.
- No revenue recognition, deferred revenue, or accounting-grade close support, so finance will still need something else.
Pricing compared
Baremetrics
Tiered subscription banded by tracked ARR, with dunning and cancellation tooling sold as separate flat-fee add-ons rather than being included in any plan.
- Launch$75
- Growth$255
- Scale$1,152
The honest framing is that you buy Baremetrics for the analytics and take the retention tooling as a well-priced extra. As a metrics platform it is comprehensive and requires no data work, which for a company without an analyst is worth the money on its own. Recover at $129 with an ROI guarantee is close to a free option: if it does not pay for your account, you get credited. Cancellation Insights at another $129 is the weaker buy, since it is a survey with offers rather than a real deflection engine, and Churnkey does that job considerably better. Buying the whole stack purely for retention would be a mistake; buying it because you need metrics and getting dunning nearly free is a good trade.
ProfitWell Metrics
Free product with no seat, revenue, or feature gate. Paddle monetises the surrounding portfolio, principally billing as merchant of record and the paid Retain product.
- ProfitWell Metrics$0
- Paddle RetainPerformance-based, quoted
On capability per dollar this is unbeatable, because the denominator is zero. Judged more usefully, ProfitWell Metrics delivers roughly seventy percent of what ChartMogul or Baremetrics charge $100 to $400 a month for, and the gaps are in polish, forecasting depth, and the fact that you are inside a competitor's ecosystem rather than a neutral one. For any company under about $2M ARR the correct decision is to run Metrics first and only pay for analytics when you can name the specific report you are missing. The honest caveat is that free analytics do not reduce churn by a single basis point, and a team that buys nothing else has bought a thermometer and called it medicine.
Editorial verdict on each
Baremetrics
Baremetrics is an excellent subscription analytics platform that also happens to sell decent retention tooling, and the order of those clauses should drive the decision. If your problem is that nobody trusts the MRR number and the churn figure is one meaningless blended percentage, Baremetrics solves that in an afternoon with no data work, and Recover at $129 with an ROI guarantee is nearly a free addition that will pay for the subscription if you have any real failure volume. If your problem is that customers keep cancelling and you want to stop them, this is the wrong tool: Cancellation Insights is a survey with a coupon attached, and Churnkey will deflect far more. The genuine competitor is ChartMogul, which has a free tier Baremetrics lacks; the deciding factor between them is usually whether you want dunning included or a CRM layer instead.
Read the full Baremetrics profileProfitWell Metrics
ProfitWell Metrics is the first thing any subscription company should install, and it is the last thing that will fix your churn. As free measurement it is remarkable: full historical backfill, standard metric definitions, cohort curves, benchmarking, unlimited seats, and no engineering time. The voluntary versus involuntary churn split alone will tell a small team which retention product is worth buying, which is worth more than most of the paid analytics in this category. Just be clear about the boundaries. It is owned by a payments company with an agenda, it has no revenue recognition for finance, and it intervenes in nothing. Install it, read the split, then spend your actual retention budget on the tool that attacks whichever half of your churn is bigger.
Read the full ProfitWell Metrics profileBaremetrics profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; ProfitWell Metrics last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.