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I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

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Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#11

Post by molsongolden »

messutied wrote: post #9

Is there an open source alternative to ChartMogul? I feel like it makes sense, at least I'd like to avoid having to share financial information with a 3rd party, would much rather use some self-hosted open source solution.

Depending on how technical you are, similar visualizations can be produced in Google Sheets/Excel or Metabase.

The issues are: 1) exporting/importing the data (manual CSV, via API, sourced from an existing DB, etc...) then 2) knowing which questions to ask and how to visualize answers to those questions

You could also code a custom dashboard using something like D3.js

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#12

Post by ezekg »

devmunchies wrote: post #2

no visualizations? you just producing raw data? why not just use SQL or excel?

Because my data is stored in Stripe. I don’t need visualizations. I print all the data in my terminal [0].

[0]: https://twitter.com/ezekgabrielse/status/1345157874356465664

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#13

Post by ezekg »

tschellenbach wrote: post #8

I never found the right solution (ChartMogul has issues with when they recognize revenue. It's based on payment instead of the period the invoice/subscription is for). Anyone have any tips to share about what they use?

That’s one of the many reasons I wrote this Rake task!

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#15

Post by chris_wot »

ezekg wrote: post #14
chris_wot wrote: post #10

I keep hearing that people aren't getting everything they want out of Baremetrics. What is it that they have a problem with?

I mean, I wrote a blog post about it... :)

You wrote a blog post that implemented functionality that you liked and also functionality that baremetrics already implemented. You weren't hugely detailed in what in particular you found lacking that actually caused you to roll your own product.

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#16

Post by ezekg »

chris_wot wrote: post #15
ezekg wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, I wrote a blog post about it... :)

You wrote a blog post that implemented functionality that you liked and also functionality that baremetrics already implemented. You weren't hugely detailed in what in particular you found lacking that actually caused you to roll your own product.

Yeah, you’re right.

I of course wanted to save the $50/mo (or was it $99?) if I could. When I moved to having a free tier, my conversion rate metric got a little wonky. I don’t remember them handling that well. I also wanted to know my time-to-convert and they don’t show that metric, among other metrics. Also, I remember their churn metric was off sometimes.

There were also some other things, like their messaging and recover features not working as you’d expect when it came to trials, which was my main need at the time. I ended up doing so much myself that they weren’t worth it to keep.

Then I tried ChartMogul, had the same lack of visibility into my metrics, and ended up going all in and writing this [0].

[0]: https://twitter.com/ezekgabrielse/status/1345157874356465664

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#17

Post by cj »

tschellenbach wrote: post #8

I never found the right solution (ChartMogul has issues with when they recognize revenue. It's based on payment instead of the period the invoice/subscription is for). Anyone have any tips to share about what they use?

Baremetrics revenue is based on the subscription period rather than payment date. (A few years ago they made the switch to that model rather than by payment date)

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#18

Post by molsongolden »

tschellenbach wrote: post #8

I never found the right solution (ChartMogul has issues with when they recognize revenue. It's based on payment instead of the period the invoice/subscription is for). Anyone have any tips to share about what they use?

I'm assuming that when you say "instead of the period the invoice/subscription is for" you mean that the invoice isn't being split and recognized across a multi-month service period.

Most products will call this Revenue Recognition. Some basic SaaS analytics/metrics products don't offer this functionality but it can be a hassle even with the ones that do. The accuracy will always depend on clean invoicing hygiene when the invoices are created.

e.g. if you create a subscription in Stripe and have modeled it properly using products, prices, etc... then the metadata for revenue recognition will be available but if you generate an invoice and write "Annual subscription 1/1/21 - 12/31/21" as the line item description then every tool will recognize that amount in full on the invoice date.

Revenue recognition might be a separate add-on for ChartMogul but I think they can do it. Chargebee and Recurly also do subscription management and maintain revenue recognition reports. Stripe semi-recently added revenue recognition to the billing dashboard. Some companies build a waterfall schedule in Excel then manually record revenue every month.

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#19

Post by BummerCloud »

I'd be cautious multiplying your MRR x 12 to establish ARR. Things like seasonality or promotions could overestimate your ARR by using inflated subscription numbers. Additionally, if customers are not contractually obligated to stick around for a year, that calculation may not account for month-to-month churn.

Re: I Replaced Baremetrics and ChartMogul with Rake

#20

Post by cj »

chris_wot wrote: post #10

I keep hearing that people aren't getting everything they want out of Baremetrics. What is it that they have a problem with?

> What is it that they have a problem with?

We struggle a lot with “fake churn” in baremetrics.

By that, I mean any time a customer on a credit card subscription upgrades to a “pay by invoice” tier, it shows as a churn of the credit card subscription and as new revenue for the invoice subscription.

This makes churn wildly inaccurate and we spend a couple hours per month adjusting the numbers to get accurate data.

FWIW profitwell suffers the same issue.

We’ve looked but haven’t found a great solution for metrics when stripe isn’t the sole source of customer payments.

Edit: But all things considered, we love baremetrics, just not their churn calculations (and by proxy, LTV is also broken, and any other metric that uses churn)

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