How to calculate MRR from Dodo Payments subscriptions

Does Dodo Payments return MRR?

No. There is no MRR endpoint, so you compute it from the subscriptions list.

The good news is that Dodo Payments gives you the right field to do it with, which is more than most merchants of record manage.

The field that matters

recurring_pre_tax_amount, and both halves of that name are the point.

Recurring. It is the amount that repeats, not the amount of the next invoice, which may include a prorated change or a one-off add-on.

Pre-tax. Tax is excluded. That is the correct basis for MRR: the VAT a merchant of record collects is not your revenue, so including it would inflate the figure by whatever your customers' tax rates happen to average.

If you have ever compared a merchant-of-record MRR against a Stripe MRR and found it mysteriously higher, tax is usually the whole gap.

The calculation

const PER_MONTH = { daily: 365 / 12, weekly: 52 / 12, monthly: 1, yearly: 1 / 12 };

async function mrr(key, host) {
  const subs = await listSubscriptions(key, host, { status: "active" });

  let total = 0;
  for (const sub of subs) {
    const amount = sub.recurring_pre_tax_amount; // minor units
    const per = PER_MONTH[sub.payment_frequency_interval?.toLowerCase()] ?? 0;
    // The count is the multiplier: every 3 months is monthly / 3.
    total += (amount * per) / (sub.payment_frequency_count ?? 1);
  }

  return Math.round(total);
}

payment_frequency_interval and payment_frequency_count work together. A subscription billing every three months has an interval of month and a count of three, so its monthly contribution is the amount divided by three.

Treating the count as decoration is the bug that hides, because annual plans have a count of one and look fine, and quarterly plans quietly read as three times their worth until somebody checks.

Weekly plans, and the month that is not four weeks

Multiply a weekly amount by 52 and divide by 12, not by four. A month averages 4.345 weeks, so the four-week shortcut undercounts weekly plans by about eight per cent. Few businesses have many weekly subscriptions, and the ones that do are usually the ones who notice.

Which statuses count

active. A subscription that is cancelled, expired or on hold is not paying you this month, and including it reports a book you no longer have.

Trials are the judgement call, as always. A trial is revenue nobody has agreed to yet. Excluding it is the honest default and it is what Notch Metrics does.

A snapshot, not a sum

MRR is the value of the book right now. It is not a total over a window, and a sparkline of it is a sparkline of your own history rather than of anything the API returned.

That is why the widget shows the figure without one. A chart implying a daily MRR series built from a single current snapshot would be inventing data.

Or read it off the notch

Notch Metrics computes Dodo Payments MRR exactly this way: active subscriptions, each recurring_pre_tax_amount normalised to a monthly amount using its payment frequency, as a snapshot of the book right now.

Put it beside total revenue and one-time sales and the month reads at a glance. Everything Dodo Payments reports, or download Notch Metrics.