Comparisons

Revenue dashboards for indie hackers

3 min readprices checked 11 October 2026

TL;DR

If you Use Price
Take money in one place, want one number MRRDock Free, MIT
Take money in several places, check constantly Notch Metrics $9/mo or $49/yr
Are under $180K ARR and want analysis Baremetrics Free to $180K ARR
Want the full detail, occasionally Stripe Dashboard Free

Prices checked on 11 October 2026.

What should a solo founder actually track?

Fewer numbers than you think, and more kinds of them.

A business run by one person has no reporting layer and no weekly metrics meeting. The numbers do their work by being glanced at, which means the right set is the one that fits in a glance and the right frequency is whatever costs you nothing to check.

Four categories cover almost every indie business:

Money. MRR if you sell subscriptions, revenue if you sell one-offs, usually both.

Demand. Visitors and where they came from. A revenue number with no traffic number beside it tells you what happened and never why.

Search. Clicks and impressions, because for most indie products search is the whole acquisition channel and it moves on a timescale you will miss if you only look monthly.

Whatever your product's health actually is. Open issues for a developer tool. Active users for an app. Subscribers for a channel. This is the one nobody can pick for you.

Notice that only the first is revenue. A revenue dashboard that is only a revenue dashboard answers a quarter of the question.

How often is too often?

The usual advice is to check less. That is almost right and slightly wrong.

The cost of checking is not the looking, it is the loading: the tab, the login, the chart redraw, and then the fifteen minutes you spend reading churn by cohort because you were already there.

Reduce the cost to nothing and the frequency stops mattering. A number you glance at twenty times a day without opening anything has cost you nothing and taught you the shape of your week. The same number behind a login twenty times a day has cost you an afternoon.

So: make it free to look, then look as much as you like.

What to use

Notch Metrics

Built for exactly this shape of business. The numbers live in the MacBook notch, the strip of glass around the camera. Hover and they are there, move away and the notch looks untouched. No dock icon, no menu bar item, no tab.

Fourteen connectors, every one included: Stripe, Polar, Paddle, Dodo Payments, Lemon Squeezy, RevenueCat, Shopify, Plausible, PostHog, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Search Console, YouTube and GitHub.

That list is the argument. An indie business in 2026 usually has money in two places, traffic in one, search in another and a repository somewhere, and every one of those is a separate dashboard.

For anything with no connector, a coding agent writes a custom metric over MCP: one JavaScript module on your own Mac, secrets in the Keychain.

Price. $9/month or $49/year. Seven-day trial, no card.

Download Notch Metrics

MRRDock

If your business genuinely is one Stripe account and one number, this is free and open source and you should use it. Keys in the Keychain, no server, MIT licensed, and its MRR rules are published.

Price. Free.

Baremetrics

Free while it tracks up to $180K ARR, which covers most indie businesses outright. Full subscription analytics, trial insights and segments, in a browser. Above the threshold it starts at $49 a month and scales with tracked revenue.

Right for the monthly question. Wrong for the daily one, because it is a tab.

Price. Free to $180K ARR, then from $49/month.

The Stripe Dashboard

Free and authoritative. Keep it for the detail and for anything you need to be certain about.

Price. Free.

The mistake worth avoiding

Picking tools by how much they can show you.

A solo founder's constraint is attention, not data. The product that shows you forty metrics has given you thirty-five opportunities to spend an afternoon on something that was not going to change the outcome.

Pick four numbers. Put them where looking costs nothing. Go back to work.

See what Notch Metrics costs · Every source

Questions

What numbers should an indie hacker track?
Four categories cover almost everything: money as MRR or revenue, demand as visitors, search as clicks and impressions, and one product-health number such as active users or open issues. Only the first is revenue, which is why a revenue-only dashboard answers a quarter of the question.
How often should I check my revenue?
As often as you like, once looking costs nothing. The expensive part is not the glance, it is the tab, the login and the fifteen minutes you then spend on churn by cohort. Reduce the cost to zero and the frequency stops mattering.
What is the best revenue dashboard for a solo founder?
It depends on how many places your money arrives. One Stripe account and one number: MRRDock, free and open source. Several sources plus traffic and search: Notch Metrics, $9 a month or $49 a year with fourteen connectors included.
Do I need a paid analytics tool as an indie hacker?
Often not. Baremetrics is free while it tracks up to $180K ARR, which covers most indie businesses, and the Stripe Dashboard already shows MRR and churn. Pay when you need cohort analysis regularly or when checking several sources has become a daily habit.
How many metrics should I watch?
About four. A solo founder's constraint is attention rather than data, and a tool showing forty metrics has given you thirty-five chances to spend an afternoon on something that was not going to change the outcome.