SaaS Metrics for Indie Hackers: The Few That Matter

SaaS metrics content is mostly written for venture-backed companies with finance teams. An indie hacker with 40 customers needs about six numbers, checked once a month, each with a formula you can do on a napkin. Here they are, in the order they matter.

1. MRR: what you have

Monthly recurring revenue is every active subscription converted to a monthly amount, discounts applied, one-off payments left out. A $120 yearly plan adds $10. It is the headline number because it moves slowly and shows the trend.

Formula and edge cases: what is MRR. Work it out for a mix of plans with the MRR calculator. If your Stripe dashboard and your own math disagree, how Stripe calculates MRR explains why.

Also track MRR growth, broken into new, expansion (upgrades), contraction (downgrades) and churned MRR. The total hides the story; the parts tell it.

2. Churn: what leaks

Customer churn is customers who canceled this month divided by customers at the start. Revenue churn does the same with MRR. Monthly churn compounds: 5% a month is about 46% a year.

For small products churn is often the number that decides everything. If you add 10 customers a month and lose 8, no launch will save you. Definitions in churn rate, and the churn rate calculator does the math, including the yearly figure.

3. ARPU: what each customer pays

ARPU is MRR divided by paying customers. It is the most underused lever: doubling ARPU with a better plan structure is usually easier than doubling customers. See ARPU.

4. LTV: what a customer is worth

Lifetime value is roughly ARPU times gross margin divided by monthly churn. At $30 a month, 80% margin and 4% churn, a customer is worth about $600 of gross profit. It tells you what a cut in churn is worth and what you can afford to spend to get a customer. See LTV and the LTV calculator.

5. CAC: what a customer costs

Customer acquisition cost is sales and marketing spend divided by new paying customers. For bootstrapped makers it is mostly time, so put a rough value on your hours if you want to compare channels honestly. Next to LTV it tells you whether growth makes money. See CAC.

6. Runway: how long you have

Runway is cash divided by net monthly burn. For a solo founder, include your living costs. It turns "should I go full time?" into a number. See runway.

What to skip for now

Cohort retention charts, net revenue retention, magic numbers and quick ratios are useful later. With under a few hundred customers, the samples are too small for them to mean much, and they take time you could spend talking to customers.

A monthly ritual

Once a month, in fifteen minutes:

1. Write down MRR, new MRR and churned MRR.
2. Calculate customer churn and ARPU.
3. Recalculate LTV with a three month average of churn.
4. Note one thing that moved and why you think it did.

Keep it in one spreadsheet. The trend over twelve rows is worth more than any single month.

Sharing the numbers

If you build in public, MRR is the number people follow. Share it from the source so nobody has to trust a screenshot: makerhandle connects Stripe, Paddle, Lemon Squeezy, Gumroad, RevenueCat or Shopify read-only and shows the figure with a check mark and a monthly chart. See verified revenue or the page for micro SaaS founders.