Why is my MRR in Stripe zero, missing or lower than I expected?

What Stripe counts as MRR

Stripe defines MRR as “the sum of the monthly-normalized value of all your active and past_due subscriptions” (Stripe: Billing analytics). It’s built from subscriptions, not from money received: Stripe’s help centre says it uses active subscriptions “rather than summing your invoices” because MRR is forward-looking (Stripe support: calculating MRR).

A yearly plan counts as a twelfth of its price each month. That’s the “monthly-normalized” part.

What Stripe leaves out

From the same Billing analytics page and Stripe’s MRR help article:

• Payments that aren’t subscriptions. A one-time Checkout payment, a one-time Payment Link or a one-off invoice adds revenue but no MRR.
• Trials. A subscription in a trial doesn’t count. With the newer item-level trial offers, only the items in a trial are left out; with a legacy trial_end trial, the whole subscription is.
• Free plans. Subscribers on free plans are excluded.
• Metered (usage-based) prices. Left out because usage “can fluctuate significantly”.
• Taxes and application fees. Not treated as revenue.
• Unpaid and cancelled subscriptions. When a subscription is cancelled or marked unpaid, Stripe counts it as churn. A single failed payment doesn’t reduce MRR on its own; only the last failed retry that makes the subscription delinquent does.
• Discounts, depending on your settings. Permanent recurring discounts are always subtracted. Whether other recurring and one-time discounts are subtracted is a setting.

One-off refunds don’t change MRR unless they come with a change to the plan’s price.

Checklist: find the difference

1. Do you have subscriptions at all? In the Dashboard, open Subscriptions. If your customers paid through one-time prices, MRR is zero by design.
2. Filter subscriptions by status. Count active and past_due separately from trialing. If most new subscriptions are trialing, that’s your gap.
3. Check for full-price coupons. If you subtract discounts, a subscriber whose coupon takes the whole price off has zero MRR, and Stripe counts them as churned until the coupon is removed (Stripe: Billing analytics).
4. Look at your metric settings. On the Billing overview, Configure controls whether discounts are subtracted and when a subscriber counts as active (at the start of the subscription or at the first payment). Changes take 24 to 48 hours to appear (Stripe: Billing analytics).
5. Check the timestamp. Most Billing charts use data within an hour of the activity, but reports downloaded from the Revenue tab still have a one-day delay (Stripe support: fresher Billing analytics data). A subscription made this morning may not be in an export yet.
6. Several currencies? MRR growth includes an FX adjustment, so a customer paying in another currency can move your MRR without changing their plan. Filtering and grouping by product or price isn’t available when you process subscriptions in more than one currency.
7. Compare with the export. Download “MRR per subscriber per month” or “Customer MRR changes” from Billing analytics and find the customer whose number isn’t what you expected.

MRR and cash aren’t the same number

A customer who paid a year upfront adds a twelfth of that to MRR every month, while your balance got it all at once. Both are right. MRR tells you what subscriptions are worth each month; your balance report tells you what arrived.

With Nordva Launch

Launch reads your Stripe account with a restricted key (GET requests only, every plan can connect) and shows the revenue from paying customers grouped by where each one first came from: by referring site and by country on every plan, and by UTM source and campaign on Builder. It reads 30 days of history on Free, 90 on Indie and 730 on Builder. Try the demo to see it with example data.