Paddle MRR on your Mac
Paddle is a merchant of record, which means it handles tax, invoicing and compliance for you. It also means one more dashboard to open.
How do you see Paddle MRR without the dashboard?
Put it in the notch. Notch Metrics renders your Paddle figures in the strip of glass around your Mac's camera. Collapsed, a thin line of numbers. Hover, and it expands over whatever you were doing. Move away and it folds back.
What Paddle reports
| Number | What it is |
|---|---|
| MRR | Active subscriptions, normalised to a month |
| Revenue | Transactions billed in the window, including tax |
| Active subscriptions | Status active right now |
| New subscriptions | Started in the window |
| Churned subscriptions | Cancelled in the window |
| Recent payments | The last ten transactions |
Paddle revenue includes tax, because as merchant of record Paddle collected it. That is worth remembering when comparing against a Stripe figure, which does not.
The Paddle quirk that shapes everything
Paddle's API cannot filter subscriptions by date. There is no
started_at[gte]. To count subscriptions that began last week, you read the
whole subscription list and filter it yourself.
Notch Metrics does exactly that, bounded so it cannot run away on a large account. It is worth knowing because it explains why new and churned subscription figures are the slow ones, and why anybody building this themselves hits a wall at scale.
Sandbox and production
Paddle runs a sandbox on a different host. The connector asks which mode your key belongs to, because a sandbox key against the production host returns 401 rather than an empty account. What the Paddle connector asks for.
Your API key is encrypted on the server with a key unique to that one connection. The Mac app never holds it.
Not just Paddle
Revenue also comes from Stripe, Polar, Dodo Payments, Lemon Squeezy and RevenueCat. Every source.
Apple silicon, macOS 14 and later. Seven days with no card, then $9 a month or $49 a year. Download Notch Metrics.
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