How to separate one-time sales from subscriptions in Dodo Payments

Why split revenue at all?

Because recurring revenue and one-time sales are different assets, and a single total treats them as the same money.

Recurring revenue is a book. It carries into next month without anybody doing anything. A one-time sale is finished the moment it lands: next month starts at zero again.

A business whose total revenue is flat for three months might be perfectly healthy, or it might be losing subscriptions and covering the gap with launches. The total cannot tell you which. The split can.

How Dodo Payments distinguishes them

A payment tied to a subscription carries a subscription id. A one-off purchase does not.

const succeeded = payments.filter((p) => p.status === "succeeded");

const recurring = succeeded.filter((p) => p.subscription_id);
const oneTime = succeeded.filter((p) => !p.subscription_id);

const sum = (rows) => rows.reduce((total, p) => total + p.total_amount, 0);

That is the whole mechanism. It is simple enough that the interesting part is the edge cases.

The first invoice is recurring

When somebody subscribes, the first charge looks exactly like a one-off purchase on the day it happens. A single payment, a single product, a card charged once.

It is not. It carries a subscription id, so the filter above puts it in the right bucket, and that is correct: the first invoice of a subscription is the start of a book, not a sale that is over.

Code that classifies by product rather than by subscription id gets this wrong, and gets it wrong in the most flattering direction, because launch months look better when every new subscriber counts as a one-time sale.

MRR is not the recurring half of revenue

Two different numbers, and conflating them is the common mistake.

Recurring revenue in a window is what renewals actually charged in those days. MRR is the normalised monthly value of the book as it stands right now, including annual plans divided by twelve.

A month with many annual renewals shows enormous recurring revenue and unchanged MRR. Both figures are correct. They answer different questions: recurring revenue is cash that arrived, MRR is what the book is worth.

What to watch

Three ratios are worth more than any one of these figures alone.

One-time share of total. If it climbs, the business is becoming launch-driven, and launch-driven businesses have to keep launching.

Recurring revenue against MRR. If recurring revenue is well above one twelfth of ARR, you are collecting annual plans, which is good for cash and means churn will be invisible for a year.

One-time sales against new subscriptions. One-time buyers who never subscribe are a different audience, and worth knowing about before you build only for the subscribers.

In the notch

Notch Metrics reports both halves as separate widgets. Total revenue counts every succeeded payment in the window, renewals and one-off purchases together. One-time sales counts only the payments not tied to a subscription. Both gross, before refunds and fees.

MRR sits beside them as a snapshot of the book, so the three together say what kind of business you are running this month.

Everything Dodo Payments reports, or download Notch Metrics.