How Stripe Calculates MRR, and Why Your Number Differs

Open Stripe's Billing overview, then a revenue dashboard, then your own spreadsheet, and you may see three different MRR figures. None of them is necessarily wrong. They make different choices about trials, discounts, failed payments and currencies. This post walks through how Stripe itself counts MRR, according to its documentation, and where other tools, including ours, differ.

Stripe's definition

Stripe's Billing analytics docs define MRR as the sum of the monthly-normalized value of all active and past_due subscriptions. The docs give an example: 100 subscribers on a $100 monthly plan and 50 on a $600 yearly plan make (100 x $100) + (50 x $600 / 12) = $12,500 MRR.

From the docs and Stripe's support article on MRR:

• Taxes are excluded.
• Free plans are excluded.
• Metered (usage-based) prices are excluded from MRR.
• Trials do not count while they are trialing.
• Past due subscriptions still count. A subscription leaves MRR when it is canceled or marked unpaid, which is counted as churn.
• One-off refunds and one-off invoice items do not change MRR.

The settings that change the number

Stripe lets you configure parts of the calculation in the Billing overview, and changes take a day or two to show:

• Discounts. You choose whether recurring discounts and one-time discounts are subtracted. Permanent recurring discounts are always subtracted. Subtracting discounts is the more conservative choice.
• When a subscriber counts as active: at the start of the subscription (the common choice) or when the first payment arrives.

So two Stripe accounts with identical customers can report different MRR because of these settings alone.

Why other tools show a different number

When a third-party dashboard disagrees with Stripe, it is usually one of these:

1. Past due. Stripe counts past due subscriptions. A tool that only counts active ones will be lower whenever payments are failing.
2. Discounts. One tool applies coupons, another does not.
3. Trials. Some tools count a trial at its future price.
4. Currencies. Converting euros and pounds to dollars at different rates, or at all, changes the total.
5. Timing. Stripe's charts use your account's time zone, its downloadable reports use UTC, and every tool syncs at different times.
6. Tiered and metered prices, which have no single monthly value.

How makerhandle counts it

We want the number on your page to be conservative and easy to explain:

• Only subscriptions with status active. Trials and past due subscriptions are left out, so a failing card does not hold up your figure.
• Each subscription item is normalized to a month (yearly divided by 12, weekly times about 4.35) and multiplied by its quantity.
• The subscription's current discount is applied.
• Tiered prices without a single unit amount are skipped.
• If you sell in several currencies, the currency with the most money in it is shown, so a stray euro sale is not added to dollars.

Because of the past due rule, our MRR can be a little lower than Stripe's. If a project has no active subscriptions, we show the last 30 days of charges, net of refunds, instead. We use a read-only restricted key with Read access to Subscriptions and Charges, and nothing else.

Which one should you share?

Whichever you pick, say what it is and keep it consistent month to month. Readers care much more about the trend than about a few dollars of definitional difference. If you want people to trust it, show it from the source: see verified Stripe MRR and the step by step guide to showing verified MRR. To sanity-check the arithmetic by hand, use the MRR calculator, and the MRR glossary entry has the general definition.