ProfitWell Metrics
Free subscription analytics that tell you exactly how you are churning
ProfitWell Metrics is a free subscription analytics product, now owned and operated by Paddle, that connects to your billing system and reports monthly recurring revenue, churn, retention, expansion, contraction, lifetime value, and cohort behaviour without any charge or seat limit. It is a measurement tool rather than a churn prevention tool: it diagnoses where revenue is leaking and separates voluntary cancellations from failed payments, but it does not intercept a cancelling customer or retry a declined card. Those jobs belong to Paddle Retain, the paid sibling product.
Overview
ProfitWell began life in 2012 as Price Intelligently, a pricing consultancy founded by Patrick Campbell that built a free metrics dashboard largely as a way to get subscription companies to hand over their billing data. The free product became more famous than the consultancy, and for most of the 2010s ProfitWell Metrics was the default answer when a small SaaS founder asked how to see their MRR without building a spreadsheet. Paddle acquired the company in 2022 and folded the portfolio into its own brand, but kept the free tier intact, which is the single most important fact about this product.
What you get for nothing is genuinely substantial. Connect Stripe, Chargebee, Braintree, Recurly, Zuora, or Paddle and within a few minutes you have monthly and annual recurring revenue, new versus expansion versus reactivation revenue, gross and net revenue churn, logo churn, average revenue per user, lifetime value, and cohort retention curves. Segmentation lets you slice all of that by plan, by billing interval, by geography, or by any customer attribute you pass in. Industry benchmarking compares your numbers against an aggregate drawn from tens of thousands of subscription companies, which is a useful sanity check when you have no idea whether five percent monthly logo churn is normal for your price point.
The catch is scope, and it matters for this category. ProfitWell Metrics will tell you that eighteen percent of your churn last month came from declined cards rather than deliberate cancellations. It will not do anything about it. The recovery half of the old ProfitWell product line lives on as Paddle Retain, which is priced on performance rather than given away, and which has its own dossier here. Treating Metrics as a retention tool is the classic mistake: it is the instrument panel, not the brakes.
The second caveat is strategic. This is a free product operated by a merchant of record that would prefer you switch your billing to Paddle. Nothing about the free tier is deceptive, and plenty of companies have run it on Stripe for years without pressure, but you should understand that the business model is lead generation for payments infrastructure, not a charity. If Paddle's priorities shift, the free tier is not contractually protected.
Best for
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.
Not the right fit for
- Anyone who thinks buying this will reduce churn. It measures churn and does nothing to prevent it. If you need failed cards retried or cancellations intercepted, you need Paddle Retain, Churnkey, Churn Buster, or Stunning, and you need to budget for them.
- Companies whose revenue does not run through a supported billing provider. If you invoice annual contracts out of QuickBooks or Xero with no subscription system underneath, there is nothing here to connect and the API path is real engineering work.
- Finance teams that need GAAP or ASC 606 revenue recognition, deferred revenue schedules, or auditable close packages. This is an operating metrics tool, not accounting software.
- Buyers who need contractual guarantees about a product's continued existence. A free tier owned by a payments company is a strategic instrument and can be repositioned; there is no SLA on generosity.
- Teams uncomfortable handing full historical billing data to a merchant of record that competes with their current payment processor, which is a legitimate reason some Stripe-based companies choose ChartMogul instead.
How it works
- 1
You sign up and authorise a read-only connection to your billing provider. Stripe, Chargebee, Braintree, Recurly, Zuora, and Paddle are supported natively, and there is an API for companies running their own billing. There is no code to write for the standard path and no engineering time to book.
- 2
ProfitWell reads your historical subscription, invoice, plan, and customer data and backfills the entire history, so the dashboard is populated with several years of numbers on day one rather than starting from the date you signed up. This is the part that makes it feel unreasonably valuable for a free tool.
- 3
It then normalises everything into standard subscription metrics. Recurring revenue is separated from one-off charges, annual plans are amortised into monthly figures, and churn is split into voluntary cancellation and involuntary failure so you can see which problem you actually have.
- 4
From there you segment, build cohorts, set alerts, and compare against industry benchmarks. Results push out to HubSpot, Zendesk, Intercom, Slack, and anywhere else through Zapier or the API, so the numbers can land in a weekly digest rather than requiring someone to open a dashboard.
Feature breakdown
25 features in 5 modulesCore subscription metrics
The standard recurring revenue reporting set, backfilled across your full billing history.- Monthly and annual recurring revenue
- MRR and ARR calculated from your billing data with annual plans amortised, one-off charges excluded, and the full history backfilled on connection rather than starting from signup day.
- Revenue movement breakdown
- New, expansion, reactivation, contraction, and churned revenue reported separately, which is the only view that explains why a flat MRR month was actually a bad one.
- Gross and net revenue churn
- Both figures reported side by side so you can see whether expansion from existing customers is covering the revenue you lose, the single number most investors ask for first.
- Logo churn and customer counts
- Active customer counts and customer-level churn tracked independently of revenue churn, which matters when you lose many small accounts and few large ones or the reverse.
- Lifetime value and ARPU
- Customer lifetime value and average revenue per user computed from your own churn and pricing rather than from a formula you maintain in a spreadsheet.
- Voluntary versus involuntary churn split
- Cancellations are separated from failed payments. This is the diagnostic that decides whether you should buy a dunning tool or a cancel flow tool, and it is the most retention-relevant thing the product does.
Segmentation and cohorts
Slicing the numbers until the churn problem has a name.- Plan and pricing segmentation
- Break every metric down by plan so you can see whether your cheapest tier is quietly generating most of your churn while contributing a fraction of revenue.
- Custom attribute segmentation
- Pass your own customer traits such as acquisition channel, company size, or industry and segment the metrics by them.
- Cohort retention curves
- Revenue and logo retention plotted by signup cohort, which shows whether the churn you are seeing is a recent regression or a long-standing structural fact.
- Billing interval comparison
- Compare monthly against annual subscribers directly, usually the fastest way to build the internal case for pushing annual plans.
- Geographic breakdown
- Revenue and churn by country or region, useful when failed payments cluster in specific card markets.
Benchmarking and health
Context for whether your numbers are bad, and early warning on accounts.- Industry benchmarking
- Compares your growth, churn, and pricing metrics against an aggregate drawn from tens of thousands of subscription companies, which answers the question a first-time founder cannot answer alone.
- Customer health scoring
- Activity-based scoring flags accounts trending toward cancellation, giving a small team a list to act on manually even though the product will not act for them.
- At-risk customer identification
- Surfaces accounts whose usage or payment behaviour has degraded, which is the closest this product comes to prevention.
- Churn prediction signals
- Predictive indicators on which subscriptions are likely to lapse, useful as a queue for a founder to email personally rather than as an automated intervention.
- Custom alerts
- Threshold alerts on the metrics you care about so a churn spike reaches you without a daily dashboard habit.
Reporting and distribution
Getting the numbers out of the dashboard and in front of people.- Recurring email digests
- Scheduled metric summaries so the team sees the numbers without logging in, which is how most small companies actually consume this.
- Unlimited seats
- No per-user charge at all, so the whole team, the board, and your accountant can have access without a procurement conversation.
- Data export
- Underlying metric data can be exported for board decks and investor updates rather than screenshotted.
- Slack and Intercom delivery
- Metrics and customer context route into the tools support and success teams already sit in.
- Public API
- An API for pushing custom subscription data in when your billing is homegrown, and for pulling metrics out into your own reporting layer.
Setup and data handling
Why this takes an afternoon rather than a quarter.- Read-only billing connection
- The standard integration path is a read-only authorisation against Stripe, Chargebee, Braintree, Recurly, Zuora, or Paddle. Nothing writes back to your billing system.
- Historical backfill
- Your entire billing history is imported on connection, so cohort analysis is available immediately rather than accruing over months.
- Multi-source consolidation
- More than one billing source can be combined into a single view, which matters if you migrated processors and left history behind.
- No engineering required
- For the supported providers there is no snippet, no SDK, and no data pipeline. A non-technical founder can complete the setup, which is not true of most tools in this category.
Use cases
4 documentedSolo founder at $8,000 MRR with no analytics budget
Revenue is tracked in a spreadsheet updated when they remember, and nobody can say what churn actually is because annual plans and refunds make the arithmetic ambiguous.
Twenty minutes after connecting Stripe there is a real MRR figure, a churn rate split into voluntary and involuntary, and cohort curves going back to the first customer, at zero cost.
Seed-stage team preparing an investor update
The lead investor wants net revenue retention, gross churn, and cohort retention by signup month, and the team has been hand-calculating them inconsistently each quarter.
The standard metric set is produced from billing data on a consistent definition, exported into the deck, and benchmarked against comparable companies so the narrative has context.
Head of growth deciding what retention tool to buy
Churn is roughly six percent a month and the team is arguing about whether to buy a dunning tool, a cancel flow tool, or a customer success platform.
The voluntary versus involuntary split settles the argument with data. If half the churn is declined cards, a payment recovery tool pays for itself immediately and a cancel flow can wait a quarter.
Bootstrapped company already paying for a retention product
The retention vendor reports how much revenue it saved, and there is no independent way to check whether overall churn actually moved.
Metrics provides an unrelated read on gross and net churn from the billing data itself, which is the only honest way to audit a vendor that is grading its own homework.
Pricing
from $0Free product with no seat, revenue, or feature gate. Paddle monetises the surrounding portfolio, principally billing as merchant of record and the paid Retain product.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| ProfitWell Metrics | $0 forever |
There is no paid upgrade path within Metrics itself. The paid products are separate. |
| Paddle Retain | Performance-based, quoted per recovered revenue |
This is the product that actually prevents churn. It is covered separately in the paddle-retain profile. |
Billing notes
- There is no invoice, no contract, and no minimum. Metrics is genuinely free rather than free up to a revenue threshold, which distinguishes it from every other product in this category.
- The commercial logic is that Paddle wants subscription companies inside its ecosystem. You are paying in data and in exposure to a payments pitch, not in money.
- Because there is no contract, there is also no commitment on Paddle's side. A free product owned by a strategic acquirer can be changed or sunset, and you should keep an export habit.
- If you eventually want recovery as well as measurement, the cost conversation moves to Paddle Retain, which is performance priced. At $50,000 MRR a performance model that takes a quarter of recovered revenue can easily exceed a flat $250 a month if recovery is working well, which is the arithmetic every buyer in this category should run.
Value assessment: 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.
Strengths & limitations
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.
- Industry benchmarking against a very large aggregate gives inexperienced founders context they cannot generate internally.
- Setup requires no engineering time at all on the supported providers, so a non-technical founder can be looking at real numbers within the hour.
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.
- Companies on invoice-based annual billing outside a subscription system get very little from it, since there is nothing standard to connect.
- Support for a free product is what you would expect from a free product; documentation and community are the realistic first line.
Head-to-head comparisons
6 alternativesProfitWell Metrics vs ChartMogul
from $0 under $10,000 MRR, then $59 per month (Starter)ChartMogul is the paid, neutral, more polished version of the same idea, with deeper segmentation, better forecasting, and no payments vendor's strategic interest attached. ProfitWell Metrics costs nothing and covers most of the same reporting. Start free, and move to ChartMogul when you can point at a specific analysis it cannot do or when board reporting quality justifies the line item.
Full ProfitWell Metrics vs ChartMogul comparisonProfitWell Metrics vs Baremetrics
from $75 per month, or $49 per month billed annually (Launch)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.
Full ProfitWell Metrics vs Baremetrics comparisonProfitWell Metrics vs Paddle Retain
from $0 additional for Paddle Billing customers; Paddle Billing itself is 5 percent plus 50 cents per checkout transactionThese are two halves of the same former company. Metrics tells you how much churn you have; Retain is the paid product that intercepts cancellations and retries failed payments. If you already bill through Paddle, Retain is included and the pairing is obvious. If you bill through Stripe, run Metrics free and compare Retain's performance pricing against a flat-fee alternative before committing.
Full ProfitWell Metrics vs Paddle Retain comparisonProfitWell Metrics vs RevenueCat
from $0 below $2,500 monthly tracked revenue, then 1% of monthly tracked revenueDifferent revenue rails entirely. RevenueCat is the equivalent instrument panel for App Store and Google Play subscriptions, where Stripe-based tools simply cannot see the data, and it charges one percent of tracked revenue above a free threshold. ProfitWell Metrics covers card and invoice billing for free. A company selling on both web and mobile realistically runs both.
Full ProfitWell Metrics vs RevenueCat comparisonProfitWell Metrics vs Grid (formerly SaaSGrid)
from $0 for companies under $1M ARRGrid, formerly SaaSGrid, reports the same retention metrics but aims at the finance function, pulling in CRM, accounting, and headcount data to produce board-grade ARR waterfalls, and it is free under $1M ARR. ProfitWell Metrics is billing-data-only and simpler. Choose Grid if a CFO or a board reporting pack is the driver; choose Metrics if a founder just needs to see churn this afternoon.
Full ProfitWell Metrics vs Grid (formerly SaaSGrid) comparisonProfitWell Metrics vs Churn Solution
from $50 per month minimum on the pay-as-you-save planChurn Solution actually intervenes, with cancel flows and dunning, and charges either twenty five percent of retained revenue or a fixed MRR-scaled fee. ProfitWell Metrics only reports. The sane sequence for a five-person SaaS is to install Metrics free, read the voluntary versus involuntary split, and then buy an intervention tool aimed at whichever half is larger.
Full ProfitWell Metrics vs Churn Solution comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- Setup time
- 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 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.
- Onboarding
- Entirely self-serve. There is no sales call, no implementation consultant, and no onboarding fee, which is consistent with the product being free.
- Migration notes
- Nothing to migrate on the way in, since the backfill handles history automatically. On the way out, export the metric data you care about; because everything is derived from your billing system, the underlying source of truth stays with you regardless.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web applicationEmail digestsAPI
- API
- Public API for pushing custom subscription data from homegrown billing and for pulling metrics into your own reporting stack. Zapier covers lighter automation.
- Compliance
- GDPROperated under Paddle's compliance posture as a merchant of record
- Data residency
- Not published as a customer-selectable option for the free Metrics product.
- SSO
- Not a published feature of the free product; expect email-based accounts.
- Security notes
- The billing integration is read-only, so the product cannot alter subscriptions, issue refunds, or change prices. That is a meaningful safety property compared with retention tools that need write access to execute pauses and discounts.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email supportIn-app helpPaddle's support organisation for billing customers
- Documentation
- Product documentation and a large library of subscription metric and pricing content published under the ProfitWell and Paddle brands.
- Community
- A substantial back catalogue of subscription benchmarking research and pricing education originally built by the ProfitWell team.
Company
- Founded
- 2012
- Headquarters
- London, United Kingdom (Paddle); originally Boston, Massachusetts
- Ownership
- Owned by Paddle following the 2022 acquisition of ProfitWell
- Founders
- Patrick Campbell
- Employees
- Not disclosed separately from Paddle
- Funding
- ProfitWell raised venture funding before being acquired by Paddle in 2022 in a deal widely reported at around $200M.
Funding history
| Round | Amount | Year | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Venture rounds as Price Intelligently and ProfitWell | Undisclosed totals | 2013 to 2019 | Built as a pricing consultancy with a free metrics product attached. |
| Acquisition by Paddle | Reported at approximately $200M | 2022 | ProfitWell Metrics, Retain, and Price Intelligently absorbed into Paddle's portfolio. |
Timeline
- 2012Founded by Patrick Campbell as Price Intelligently, a subscription pricing consultancy.
- 2014Launches a free subscription metrics dashboard that connects to Stripe, initially as a way to source pricing data.
- 2018Rebrands the company around the ProfitWell name as the free metrics product outgrows the consultancy in reach.
- 2022Acquired by Paddle in a deal reported at around $200M; Metrics, Retain, and Price Intelligently join Paddle's portfolio.
- 2026Metrics remains free and unmetered under the Paddle brand, with Retain positioned as the paid churn prevention product alongside it.
Integrations
- Stripe
- Chargebee
- Braintree
- Recurly
- Zuora
- Paddle
- HubSpot
- Zendesk
- Intercom
- Slack
- Zapier
- Public API for custom billing systems
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is ProfitWell Metrics?
It is a free subscription analytics product owned by Paddle. It connects to your billing system and reports recurring revenue, churn, retention, expansion, lifetime value, and cohort behaviour, with your full billing history backfilled on connection. It measures churn rather than preventing it.
Is ProfitWell Metrics really free, and what is the catch?
Yes, genuinely free with no seat limit, revenue cap, or feature gate. The catch is strategic rather than financial: Paddle is a merchant of record that would like subscription companies inside its ecosystem, and it also sells the paid Retain product that actually prevents churn. You pay in data and in exposure to a payments pitch.
Does ProfitWell Metrics recover failed payments?
No. It reports how much revenue you lost to declined and expired cards, and separates that involuntary churn from deliberate cancellations, but it never retries a payment or sends a dunning email. Recovery is the job of Paddle Retain, Churnkey, Churn Buster, or Stunning.
Which billing systems does it support?
Stripe, Chargebee, Braintree, Recurly, Zuora, and Paddle are supported natively with a read-only connection. Companies running homegrown billing can push data through the public API, which is real engineering work rather than a click-through setup.
Does it work if we bill annual contracts by invoice?
Only partly, and this is the honest weak point. If those invoices run through a supported subscription system it works fine and amortises annual plans into monthly figures. If your annual customers are invoiced out of accounting software with no subscription record, there is nothing standard to connect and you are looking at API work or a different tool.
How long does setup take and how much engineering does it need?
For a supported billing provider, under thirty minutes and no engineering at all. You authorise a read-only connection and wait for the historical backfill. That is a sharp contrast with cancel flow tools, which need a front end change, and with product analytics, which need event instrumentation.
How does it compare with ChartMogul and Baremetrics?
Those are paid, more polished, and more capable on forecasting and segmentation depth, and they come from vendors with no payments agenda. ProfitWell Metrics covers most of the same core reporting for nothing. The pragmatic path for a small company is to run Metrics free until you can name the specific report you are missing.
What should a five-person SaaS buy first for retention?
Install ProfitWell Metrics on day one because it is free and it tells you which problem you have. If most of your churn is failed cards, buy a payment recovery tool next, since that revenue was never trying to leave. If most of it is deliberate cancellation, buy a cancel flow tool. Buying a customer success platform before you know the split is how small teams waste a year.
Can it tell me why customers are cancelling?
No. It tells you how many, in which segments, and at what revenue cost, but it collects no qualitative feedback. Cancellation reasons come from a cancel flow survey such as Churnkey or Churn Solution, and sentiment signals come from a survey tool such as Refiner or SatisMeter.
Who owns ProfitWell and is the product still maintained?
Paddle acquired ProfitWell in 2022 in a deal reported at around $200M, and Metrics continues to be offered free under the Paddle brand alongside the paid Retain product. The founding company was started in 2012 by Patrick Campbell as Price Intelligently.
Editorial verdict
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.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.