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Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

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Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#3

Post by danpalmer »

At my previous company we used Stripe, and never saw any value in their data products. I was always curious as to why they had data products and would be interested to hear the other side – satisfied users with solved use-cases.

The reason it always seemed weird to me is that billing data is just one small portion of a company's data. We had all sorts of data about our users – preferences, demographics, data from marketing campaigns, how they browsed our site, etc, all of which was much more insightful than data about how they paid. Now we didn't have recurring subscriptions which perhaps adds a little value, but Stripe still delivers data via webhook back to your application, and companies still need to keep their application records up to date, so surely most details to compute MRR, churn, etc are already being delivered. Why would you analyse this in Stripe which doesn't have any of your other data?

If a company uses the very high-level Stripe products, and is (or almost) a no-code implementation, perhaps just a Stripe plugin in a Wordpress site, then I can sort of understand it, but what's the value for a company with any sort of custom integration or using any of the lower level products like billing?

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#4

Post by peterldowns »

I used to work on Sigma/ReportingDataPlatform, and all I’ll say here is that this article is wildly off base with regards to utility and cost — the DoorDash examples are laughable.

The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data.

I am very skeptical that working with data provided by Lago makes it any easier than working with the data you can get from Sigma or from data pipeline exports.

I don’t have a lot of love for Stripe by any means, but this is poorly argued.

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#5

Post by echelon »

peterldowns wrote: post #4

I used to work on Sigma/ReportingDataPlatform, and all I’ll say here is that this article is wildly off base with regards to utility and cost — the DoorDash examples are laughable. The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data. I am very skeptical that working with data provided by Lago makes it any easier than working with the data you can get from Sigma or from da…

> The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data.

Then Stripe should provide the metric as an API and precalculate it. (They already have as it powers their dashboards, it's just inaccessible via API access.)

It's extremely frustrating that external metrics dashboards report MRR as significantly higher than it actually is.

It makes me distrust and dislike Stripe that such a core figure is absent in their API. There should be zero excuse for not providing it. It's a ridiculous omission.

I've spent too much time trying to solve this and it disappoints me.

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#6

Post by peterldowns »

danpalmer wrote: post #3

At my previous company we used Stripe, and never saw any value in their data products. I was always curious as to why they had data products and would be interested to hear the other side – satisfied users with solved use-cases. The reason it always seemed weird to me is that billing data is just one small portion of a company's data. We had all sorts of data about our users – preferences, demographics, data from mar…

Some businesses are large enough that polling the API and/or ingesting webhooks is a poor architectural choice or simply impossible — Sigma and the other bulk data products are extremely useful for these businesses.

The other kind of business that benefits from Sigma is much lower tech than yours, and most likely doesnt have a database or something that can accept webhooks.

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#7

Post by peterldowns »

echelon wrote: post #5
peterldowns wrote: post #4

I used to work on Sigma/ReportingDataPlatform, and all I’ll say here is that this article is wildly off base with regards to utility and cost — the DoorDash examples are laughable. The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data. I am very skeptical that working with data provided by Lago makes it any easier than working with the data you can get from Sigma or from da…

> The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data. Then Stripe should provide the metric as an API and precalculate it. (They already have as it powers their dashboards, it's just inaccessible via API access.) It's extremely frustrating that external metrics dashboards report MRR as significantly higher than it actually is. It makes me distrust and dislike Stripe that…

I don’t disagree with you.

Re: Stripe Data vs. Open‐Source Alternatives: A MRR Example

#9

Post by AnhTho_FR »

peterldowns wrote: post #4

I used to work on Sigma/ReportingDataPlatform, and all I’ll say here is that this article is wildly off base with regards to utility and cost — the DoorDash examples are laughable. The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data. I am very skeptical that working with data provided by Lago makes it any easier than working with the data you can get from Sigma or from da…

The question is: how can we (Lago) make it much easier (if you think it's not the case today) than working with the data from Sigma and from data pipeline exports?
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