Paddle Billing
ProfitWell Metrics
ProfitWell has partnered with Braintree to provide its users with deep insights into their financial metrics. That said, there are few differences in the methodologies around calculating these metrics.
Topic | ProfitWell | Braintree |
Cancellations and Churn | When a customer cancels their subscription, we recognize the MRR of a customer until the end of their billing cycle. | The MRR of a subscription is removed at the time of cancellation. |
New business and Churn in the same month | When a customer signs up and churns in the same calendar month, we ignore them from your metrics entirely to not inflate new + churn. | This revenue is factored into both new MRR and Churn. |
Discounts and Credits | We always subtract discounts and credits before calculating MRR, regardless of frequency. | When creating a subscription, Braintree will automatically inherit any add-ons and/or discounts associated with the plan. |
Refunds | Generally speaking, we ignore refunds. With the purpose of MRR being a momentum metric, we're focused on events that are recurring. If you offer a customer a one-month full refund, we don't believe that should be classified as churn, and reactivation the next month—or, in the case of a partial refund: a downgrade, and upgrade the next month. It doesn't seem actionable to include these scenarios into your metrics. | All invoiced credits or refunds with a start and end date are included in MRR. |
Subscriptions on hold | When a customer has a subscription that is on hold, we downgrade them to $0 in MRR. | MRR will be $0. |
Reactivations | If a customer churns and comes back within any period in time, they will be marked as a reactivation. | Once canceled, a subscription can't be reactivated. You would have to create a new subscription. You can't cancel subscriptions that have already been canceled. |
Metered billing | We roll all recurring metered billing into MRR. | Usage charges are not included in MRR. |
Calculating LTV | Our calculation is roughly ARPU/(1-Retention), but we also apply a smart smoothing algorithm on top of this. In other words, we take a look at more than the current month ARPU and churn rate: we take a look at the whole ARPU (typically stable) and churn (usually volatile) trends, apply some magic (math, really!), and go from there. We also think that upgrades, reactivations, and downgrades should also meaningfully impact your LTV, so instead of simply taking churn, we take 1-Retention as the denominator. | Braintree does not calculate LTV. |
Free plans ($0 subscriptions) | We bundle free plans into trials. | Users on free plans/$0 subscriptions are considered active customers. |
Classifying customers | A customer, by our definition, must be actively paying you for your product or service on a recurring basis. | Users with subscriptions set to start in the future will be given a Pending status. Users on trials are considered active customers. |
Accuracy is, has been, and will always be our top priority. If you have any questions, please reach out to us with an example of a customer that is either missing or reflecting inaccurate subscription activity within ProfitWell. We're happy to help get to the bottom of any discrepancies!