Hi there —

Today we have the 2024 SaaS Metrics Platform Rankings Report fresh off the presses.

We compare and rank ChartMogul, Baremetrics, Profitwell, SaaSGrid, and Founderpath to find the best subscription analytics platform — so you can easily and visually understand how your business is actually performing.

Who will win our coveted 2024 award for best SaaS metrics platform? See below for the answer.

If you’re not yet a SaasRise member, apply to join us here for more killer data-driven content like this. We welcome all SaaS founders and CEOs with $1M-$250M in ARR to join our private SaaS growth mastermind community.

Now, let’s jump right in to the report below (also available as a Google Doc here)!

The Top SaaS Metrics Platforms: 2024 Rankings
By Ryan Allis, CEO & Founder of SaasRise

For this report, I connected the SaasRise Stripe account with the below five leading SaaS metrics platforms. I wanted to see which one would be best to help me best understand our recurring revenue subscription business.

1. ChartMogul (14 day free trial, free up to 10k MRR then ~$200/mo) 

2. BareMetrics (14 day free trial, free up to 30K MRR then ~$200/mo)

3. Profitwell (free)

4. SaasGrid (free)

5. Founderpath (free, also provides revenue-based financing loans)

If you have a recurring revenue business, you can integrate Stripe, Recurly, ChargeBee, or any other major billing platform (or your own CSV file) with these tools and have beautiful visualizations on your data within a few hours. 

These tools will show you key business metrics, including MRR, ARR, Churn, ARPA, Lifetime Value, and Quick Ratio. Some will even integrate with your Quickbooks or Xero and display CAC, LTV:CAC Ratio, CAC Payback Months, and more.

We’re using our own actual current metrics for the sake of everyone’s learning in the report.

Back in 2003/2004 when I was starting iContact we were part of the early group of SaaS companies and investors that were defining and creating these SaaS metrics — so it’s fun to be writing about them 20 years later.

Here are my rankings for the platforms on their visualizations of each of the major SaaS Metrics:

SaaS Metrics Definitions

For this article, knowing these SaaS Metrics definitions will be helpful:

• MRR - Monthly Recurring Revenue

• ARPA - Average Revenue Per Account per month

• ACV - Average Annual Contract Value

• Account Churn - The % of customers who cancel monthly

• Lifespan - Number of forecasted months of average customer life (1/account churn)

• Lifetime Value - Estimated lifetime revenue for a customer (1/account churn)*ARPA

• Quick Ratio - New customers / lost customers for a month

• Trial Conversion - % of trials from a month who eventually convert into paying customers

• CAC - Customer Acquisition Cost (goal should be around 1/6th of LTV)

• CAC Payback Months - # of Months of Revenue to Recoup Sales & Marketing Costs (Target 6-12)

• LTV:CAC Ratio - Lifetime Value divided by Customer Acquisition Cost (Target 6:1)

For SaasRise (we we started 7 months back as a growth mastermind community for SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M-$250M in ARR and so far have 200 members), our current metrics are approximately:

• MRR - $29k

• ARPA - $206

• ACV - $2472

• Monthly Account Churn - 10%

• Lifespan - 10 Months

• Lifetime Value - $2060 

• Quick Ratio - 4.6

• Trial Conversion - 84% (very high due to credit card required trial)

• CAC - $300 (from Meta, Google and LI ads using lookalike lists, retargeting, and custom audience matching)

• CAC Payback Months - 1.5 months

• LTV:CAC Ratio - 6.9

Overall, our quick ratio is great as we’re growing memberships very quickly right now (by around 25% per month). However our churn is too high – which we are working to reduce through adding additional value (like a recently added active Slack channel to support each other and specialized weekly mastermind groups for Enterprise-focused companies. 

We are also working on increasing LTV by increasing ARPA by offering upsells like our new platinum membership for those who want more group coaching from me to accelerate their growth path. We will also later this year start selling a $5k recorded course on B2B SaaS growth to further increase LTV. Upsells of additional education or community that help make your customers more successful are a great idea!

Want to learn more about SaasRise? You can view our membership overview deck here.

Now, it’s time to look at ChartMogul, BareMetrics, ProfitWell, SaasGrid, and Founderpath. Below is my in-depth review of each SaaS Metrics platform, organized by each key feature. 

(Side note: I shared these findings early with 5th place finisher Founderpath and they are excited to improve their metrics tools in the coming months as they continue to expand their revenue-based financing offers where they offer 2-3 year loans of up to 50% of ARR as a non-dilutive alternative to venture capital. They are one of our partners and have provided revenue-based non-dilutive capital to us and some of our members.)

Key Metric #1: Monthly Recurring Revenue

Here’s what the MRR build by month looks like on each of the platforms. 

Founderpath, SaasGrid, and Profitwell all properly do MRR graphs, while ChartMogul and Baremetrics don’t. 

We started SaasRise seven months ago and we just passed $29k in MRR from our community memberships… not bad for bootstrapping. This also doesn’t include our 1:1 CEO coaching, growth consulting, exit consulting, or digital ads management revenue (other services we provide).

Let’s see our actual MRR build bar graph on each of the five metrics tools on screenshots taken toward the end of April 2024. Let’s look at the visualizations…

ChartMogul MRR Graph
While ChartMogul does show MRR by month, it does not show the various movements of that MRR in the same graph (like SaaSGrid, ProfitWell, and Founderpath do well below). This makes it hard to actually see what’s causing the increases or decreases in MRR each month. 

ChartMogul shows a different graph on a different page to show the causes of the MRR movements, which makes it rather difficult to understand at a glance. ChartMogul lost five points for this shortcoming in our rankings this year.

BareMetrics MRR Graph
The MRR Build graph on Baremetrics is sub-optimal as it also doesn’t show each category (new, expansion, contraction, churn, net change) visually in bar graph format – that needs to change that to the standardized view shown on the other platforms. Baremetrics lost five points for this shortcoming in our rankings this year. 

SaaSGrid, Founderpath, and Profitwell all do MRR build graphs way better, and all earned 10/10 in this category.

ProfitWell MRR Graph
ProfitWell did their MRR build graph the right way, showing existing MRR plus reactivations plus upgrades minus downgrades minus churn – which each category in a different color. Note the MRR is a bit lower as I took the screenshot about 10 days ago.

SaasGrid MRR Graph
SaasGrid also did their MRR graph the right way. The MRR is a bit lower than the above platforms as I wrote this article over the course of the last 10 days and pulled graphs on different days for each platform.

Founderpath MRR Graph
Founderpath also did their MRR build graph the right way. 

Key Metric #2: Account Churn

Now let’s look at the churn calculation on each of the five metrics platforms. ChartMogul, ProfitWell, BareMetrics, and Founderpath do it well, while SaasGrid does not.

ChartMogul Account Churn
ChartMogul accurately shows my churn is 12.63% for April 2024 and has averaged 7.90% over the last 3 months, implying a lifespan of 12.6 months and a lifetime value of $2469.

Baremetrics Account Churn

Baremetrics does a good job of showing churn rates by month. Their 3 month churn average is 9.43%, implying an average lifespan of 10.6 months (1/.0943).

ProfitWell Account Churn
ProfitWell says 3 month monthly churn average is 10%, implying 10 months of life (1/churn) for an average SaasRise Member.

Founderpath Account Churn
Founderpath has recently added the ability to see account churn over the last 1 month, 3 months, and 12 months (they call it “logo churn”). They are still working on improving some of their data visualizations and UI/UX (I’m helping them a bit with it). 

Not So Good at Account Churn… SaaSGrid
SaaSGrid doesn’t show monthly account churn. They show revenue retention per month, but to properly calculate LTV you need to know monthly account churn (the formula for LTV is 1/churn*ARPA). This is a weakness in the SaaSGrid metrics platform.

Key Metric #3: ARPA

ARPA (also sometimes known as ARPU) is average revenue per account per month. I like to call it ARPA as I want to know revenue per customer account not revenue per user (as some customers will have many users). 

ACV is average annual contract value (ARPAx12). SMB SaaS provides usually talk about ARPA while enterprise firms with annual contracts required usually talk about ACV.

BareMetrics ARPA
Baremetrics does it well…

ChartMogul ARPA
ChartMogul also does APRA right (and they even call it the right thing!)

ProfitWell ARPA
ProfitWell puts ARPA under the “Unit Economics” tab and tries to graph it on the same graph as LTV and MRR, leading to a very confusing chart to read even for a SaaS metrics expert. Try to make heads and tails of the below line graph.

SaasGrid ARPA
SaasGrid shows ACV but doesn’t show ARPA. ARPA is needed in order to calculate LTV (unless you’re using annual account churn numbers). They should also show ARPA, which would be easy as that’s just ACV / 12.

Founderpath ARPA
Founderpath shows ARPA on just one summary graph. When I click “View More” it doesn’t show me ARPA but instead it shows me a list of all my customers, which isn’t too helpful. The ARPA here is higher ($835 vs. $206) in this visualization because I manually added to Founderpath via spreadsheet all the monthly revenue from three additional 1:1 consulting clients in addition to our 170+ paying SaasRise monthly members.

Key Metric #4: Lifetime Value

You need to be able to estimate the lifetime value of a customer so you know how much you can spend in upfront Sales & Marketing costs to acquire the customer. Usually you’ll want to target spending around 1/6th of your LTV in customer acquisition costs (or up to 1/3rd if you’re venture backed and want to grow as fast as possible and aren’t concerned about profitability in the short term).

The formula for lifetime value is (1/account churn)*ARPA. This is the total amount of revenue that is expected to come from your average customer over their expected lifetime. 

Each platform will calculate the monthly churn average they use to estimate LTV over slightly different time periods → sometimes 1 month, sometimes 3 months, sometimes 6 months. So that is why the numbers below vary.

(Side note: some people use gross margin instead of revenue for LTV but I don’t. I call that Lifetime Margin).

ChartMogul LTV
ChartMogul uses a 6 month average churn rate to estimate our LTV at $2713 as you can see below. 

Baremetrics LTV
Let’s start with Baremetrics. Baremetrics says we’ve got a LTV of $1605 based on our ARPA of $197 and April 2024 churn of 12.9%. 

ProfitWell LTV
ProfitWell sort of buries the Lifetime Value under the Unit Economics section (had to look hard to find it) and then shows it on a graph with 3 different Y axes (yikes!)...

Please, ProfitWell, for the love of the Chart Crime Gods don’t ever again try to display LTV, ARPU, Customers, and MRR on the same chart. 🤯

Thankfully, Profitwell also has a handy chart underneath the graph that makes things clearer.

Founderpath LTV
Founderpath does not yet properly estimate lifetime value, instead using a visually confusing historical-only lookback by cohort (for conservative underwriting purposes), which provides little insight into what a customer is actually worth and what you can afford to spend to get a customer. Trying to make heads and tails of the below LTV graphs from Founderpath left me scratching my head. Thankfully they’ve promised to add in a “Forecasted LTV” section to their next update that I hear is coming soon!

For LTV, Founderpath needs to simply copy Baremetrics or ChartMogul.

As I was explaining to Founderpath founder/CEO Nathan Latka (a friend of mine for 15 years) this week… the estimated LTV is essential to show in a SaaS metrics platform. The whole essence of my CAC based scaling method (that I call the SaaS Growth System).

1. Estimate LTV (1/monthly account churn)*ARPA

2. Multiply LTV by 1/6th

3. Target that as your max S&M CAC (or use 6-12 month payback period)

4. Turn on ads across all channels (and outbound if ACV > $10k)

5. Calculate CPL and CPA by channel

6. Take Founderpath loan if unit economics profitable

7. Scale up working channels 

8. Profit (increased revenue growth plus higher multiple exit).

Once you know your LTV, you’re off to the races and can begin testing paid search, retargeting, custom audience matching, and lookalike audience ads across Google, Meta, LinkedIn, Bing, Adroll, affiliate networks, and the review sites – and ramping up outbound if your ACV > $10k. Get one or two of those channels to be CAC-Profitable (1/6th of LTV or better) and you’re off to the races with scaling up revenue in a big way and you can scale up like we did at iContact to $50M ARR.

SaasGrid LTV
SaasGrid also does not properly estimate lifetime value, instead using a historical-only approach that provides little actual value until many many years have passed. They would be well-served by adding the standard subscription revenue LTV estimation calculation, which is ((1/churn) * ARPA)) shown by month. While it’s nice to ALSO see the historical vintages this should not replace an actual LTV estimation.

Key Metrics #5 - Trial Conversion

Trial conversion is the percentage of trials from a particular month who eventually convert. Some platforms calculate it incorrectly (not taking into account the time it takes for the trials to convert), others do it right.

ChartMogul Trial Conversion
ChartMogul does trial conversion reporting the right way…

SaasGrid Trial Conversion
SaasGrid also calculates trial conversion properly (showing 84.9% conversion for March 2024). They attribute paid conversions to the month the trial started, creating accurate calculations.  While this does mean that I won’t have fully accurate numbers for the prior month until the 14th of the next month (when the prior month cohort of trials has fully converted due to my 14 day free trial) – that’s okay with me.

BareMetrics Trial Conversion
BareMetrics calculates trial conversion incorrectly, which allows for silly or way off conversion rates like 165% (see Nov 2023) or 50% (see April 2024). The actual conversion rate of the trials who started their trial in November 2023 was 80%. It also incorrectly includes trials that are still within their 14 day trial period in the total conversion rate in the top left, which causes the figure to be substantially understated for growing companies. 

ProfitWell Trial Conversion
ProfitWell’s calculation of trial conversion is also incorrect. They show that 53.7% of our trials converted in March 2024 when in fact 62 converted into paying customers of the 73 trials who started in March 2024 (84.9%). They have the same math problem as BareMetrics.

Founderpath Trial Conversion
Founderpath sadly does not show trial conversion % at all. Should be an easy win for their team to add soon.

Key Metric #6 - Quick Ratio

The quick ratio is new customers added in a time period divided by the number of lost customers. To grow, you need a ratio above 1.0.

The best venture-backed businesses consistently maintain a quick ratio above 3 (they are adding 3x as many customers monthly as they are losing). This is pretty easy to do in year 1 or 2 – but requires massive investment in growth to maintain in years 3 onward when the existing customer count is higher (and thus you have to add more to outrun the churn plateau). 

Companies with a quick ratio under 1.0 are generally shrinking in size, unless they happen to have enough revenue growth from existing customers to make up for the churn. 

BareMetrics Quick Ratio
BareMetrics shows the Quick Ratio while others do not – giving it ten points in our 2024 ranking. SaasRise has a 4.46 quick ratio currently, meaning that for every 1 customer that cancels, we add 4.46 new paying customers. This can only be possible with either very low churn (which we don’t have) or very good marketing (which we do have).

Let’s go other platforms — add this important and standard metric!

Key Metric #7 - Retention Tables

Looking at your cohort retention tables can tell you if your current vintage of customers from recent months are churning at lower rates or higher rates than average, a leading barometer for how your onboarding and churn reduction efforts are going. 

ChartMogul Retention Tables
Here’s what ChartMogul’s retention tables look like:

BareMetrics Retention Tables
Baremetrics does it well…

ProfitWell Retention Tables
ProfitWell also does it well, adding some nice green, red, yellow color coding that helps makes sense of things.

SaaSGrid Retention Tables
SaaSGrid does it nicely also…

Founderpath Retention Tables
Founderpath hasn’t labeled their retention table in the cells, reducing the utility of this report by a bit (see the others for better examples). Shades of blue aren’t quite going to get the job done with clarity. Plus my firm has only been around 7 months so I don’t know why they are showing 12 months of data.

Now that we’ve reviewed the most important 7 key metrics, let’s look at three key features: industry benchmarks, geographic visualizations, and mobile apps.

Key Feature #1: Industry Benchmarks

Knowing how your company compares to other SaaS companies with similar ACVs or age is important. Here are some of the best benchmarking visuals these platforms offered.

ChartMogul Industry Benchmarks
ChartMogul offers a very cool comparison that allows you to see how fast you are growing compared to other firms. SaasRise is growing in the top 15% of firms that ChartMogul tracks, reaching $343k in ARR after 7 months. 

ChartMogul also provides industry benchmarks with 25th percentile, median, and 75th percentile for MRR Growth Rate, Customer Retention Rate, and Net Revenue Retention Rate. To be in the top 25% of companies in their system, you need a 86% revenue growth rate, a 75% annual retention rate, and an 84% annual net retention rate (which is new customer revenue plus existing customer expansion revenue minus churned customer revenue).

Now, don’t beat yourself up if you’re not at 86% revenue growth – as many companies in ChartMogul are small and thus growing off a minimal base. It’s easy to grow 100% in year two. Doing that in year six is hard!

BareMetrics Industry Benchmarks
Baremetrics also offers some neat benchmarks, though it would be quite helpful to see how I compare to all subscription-based firms in their system via a drop down menu, not just those in my cohort. In my “cohort” of $100+ ARPU customers of theirs they are comparing against, we do especially well on the Quick Ratio.

ProfitWell Industry Benchmarks
ProfitWell has some nice benchmark visualizations. They grouped me by firms with $25k to $100k MRR. It would be nice to be able to look at the data overall and based on MRR and ARPA cohorts, but only MRR groupings are available.

Founderpath Industry Benchmarks
Founderpath doesn’t really offer industry benchmarks yet, but they do give you a cool “SaaS Credit Score” based on a number of factors – that you can utilize to get an RBF loan from them in 3-4 days for up to 50% of your ARR that you can use to ramp up your customer acquisition or R&D. Now, that’s pretty cool. 

Key Feature #2: Geo View of Customers

The “geographic view” of customers on ChartMogul is really helpful – it allows me to look at both revenue, customers, ARPA, churn, and LTV by country. Take a look…

This tool helped me figure out that 70% of my customers come from North America, 20% from Europe, and 10% from the rest of the world (perhaps because so far we only offer CEO/Founder masterminds in the Western timezones. Soon we will be adding new SaasRise CEO/Founder masterminds in the Middle East/Asia/Oceania time zones.

This geoview would be a nice feature add for other platforms, especially Baremetrics who is doing their best to keep up with ChartMogul. Baremetrics does win on overall UI/UX design ease-of-use however.

Key Feature #3: Mobile App

BareMetrics Mobile App
Baremetrics mobile app actually exists, which gets it 5 points. Unfortunately, much of the data is broken and wrong for all time periods other than 1 month. As you can see, according to the Baremetrics mobile app we’ve generated $31,171 in the last 30 days in net revenue, but somehow only $4,137 over the last 365 days, which of course is mathematically impossible. It’s time to get that right!

ChartMobile Mobile App
The ChartMogul mobile app also exists, which is good… but it’s very very basic, requires a QR code API key (not user friendly) to set up and only has one screen on it and it doesn’t show many of the basic metrics like Churn, ARPA or LTV.

Overall Takeaways from our Review of SaaS Metrics Platforms

There are many more features of all five platforms that aren’t covered in this article, so we encourage you to check all five of them out with their free trials or free accounts. Personally, I like to have all of them and compare and contrast but if I had to choose one paid one I’d go with ChartMogul and of course there’s no reason not to use the free ones ProfitWell, SaaSGrid, and Founderpath.

You can sign up for them here (and within 2-24 hours have all your data analyzed depending on how many transactions you have).

• ChartMogul (Free up to 10k MRR then ~$200/mo, 14 day free trial) 

• BareMetrics (free up to 30K MRR then ~$200/mo, 14 day free trial)

• Profitwell (free)

• SaaSGrid (free)

• Founderpath (free, also provides revenue-based financing loans)

Overall, ChartMogul (#1), BareMetrics (#2), and ProfitWell (#3) are the winners of the 2024 SaaS Metrics Platforms Rankings by SaasRise, the growth mastermind community for SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M to $250M in ARR (you can apply to join us here). 

Did you like this article? Do want to learn more about SaasRise, our community for SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M to $250M in ARR? View our membership overview deck here and apply at www.saasrise.com.

Join Our Community of SaaS CEOs & Founders

Thanks for reading. We hope this 2024 SaaS M&A Report has been helpful to you. Please take a moment to learn more about SaasRise, our community for SaaS CEOs and Founders. We welcome all CEOs and Founders with $1M-$250M in ARR to join us. We hold three masterminds each week for our members and provide an in-depth library of SaaS growth, fundraising, and exit resources. You can apply here.

See you next week with more killer SaaS scaling content!

Join Our Community for SaaS CEOs at $1M+ in ARR

Thanks for reading! If you liked this article, join the SaasRise community at www.saasrise.com for even more helpful growth content and weekly SaaS CEO masterminds.

About the Author: Ryan Allis is the founder of SaasRise, a community for SaaS CEOs with $1M to $100M in ARR. Ryan previously led iContact as CEO and Co-Founder to $50M ARR and a $169M exit, raised $47M in equity capital and $6M in venture debt, and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School. Today, Ryan advises B2B SaaS CEOs on scaling up and helping them prepare for nine figure exits.

P.S. - Below are six valuable SaaS growth resources we’ve put out. I hope they are useful to you!

Six Helpful Free SaaS Growth Resources from SaasRise

The most in-depth guide for scaling up SaaS companies from $0 to $50M in ARR. Including over 1,200 slides on every aspect of SaaS scaling.

How to determine whether to scale up or down your marketing channels

How to calculate ARPU, LTV, Churn, Lifespan, CPL, CAC, and Max CAC

A fourteen page in-depth PDF on we take each CEO client through a six-phase process designed to increase lead volume, customer acquisition, and revenue growth — and then scale up the sales team, executive team, and investor support as we help you prepare for future fundraising rounds (if needed) or an exit (if desired).

A twenty page in-depth PDF on how to scale a B2B SaaS Company from $1M to $50M ARR. Covering CAC-based customer acquisition, sales team scaling, venture capital markets, and preparing for the exit.

The SaaS Growth Formula was written to help SaaS CEOs who are focused on growing their company's sales - by implementing a simple formula called The Growth Formula. This formula is for companies that have already established product/market fit, already have paying customers, and are now ready to scale up through scientific and CAC-based digital marketing, inbound sales, and outbound sales.

Join Our Saas Growth Mastermind for CEOs and Founders With $1M+ in ARR

If you like the above resources and want more stuff like this, apply to join SaasRise, our mastermind community for SaaS CEOs and Founders with $1M+ in ARR who are focused on scaling up MRR. Every Wednesday we jump on an optional mastermind call to support each other and share what is working with scaling our companies – and we support each other throughout the week in our private community.

About The Author

We’ll see you next time with more great SaaS growth and scaling content!