Hacker News Reader

Comment by peterldowns | Hacker News Reader

I used to work on Sigma/ReportingDataPlatform, and all I’ll say here is that this article is wildly off base with regards to utility and cost — the DoorDash examples are laughable.

The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data.

I am very skeptical that working with data provided by Lago makes it any easier than working with the data you can get from Sigma or from data pipeline exports.

I don’t have a lot of love for Stripe by any means, but this is poorly argued.

View on HN

> The article is correct that calculating MRR is difficult and requires access to your billing data.

Then Stripe should provide the metric as an API and precalculate it. (They already have as it powers their dashboards, it's just inaccessible via API access.)

It's extremely frustrating that external metrics dashboards report MRR as significantly higher than it actually is.

It makes me distrust and dislike Stripe that such a core figure is absent in their API. There should be zero excuse for not providing it. It's a ridiculous omission.

I've spent too much time trying to solve this and it disappoints me.

I don’t disagree with you.

A counterpoint, from someone who’s worked on SaaS billing /MRR reporting for 10+ years - it’s usually more complicated than just exposing an API endpoint for precalculated MRR by month. Most analysis requires drilling into dimensions of MRR growth - by cohort, by billing period, etc - and so while Stripe exposing an API for MRR could be helpful, it won’t cover most of the cases for proper financial analysis for a SaaS business. There’s also the complication of how MRR is computed across companies and domains - it’s not a GAAP metric and no standardized definitions.

I have to agree here. Feels like pure marketing/selling blogpost. I was not convinced.

Try hooking Stripe up to any third party analytics dashboard. You won't get an accurate MRR.

It really sucks if you want to have Stripe metrics in front of your team.

That’s one of the options, yes. Chartmogul does an amazing job at ingesting and retrieving revenue data from stripe

The question is: how can we (Lago) make it much easier (if you think it's not the case today) than working with the data from Sigma and from data pipeline exports?

I don’t think you can, which is why I criticized this blogpost for failing to demonstrate a compelling answer, and instead relying on misleading arguments based on invalid pricing assumptions.

If you think it’s easier to calculate MRR with Lago than with data derived from Sigma or the reporting data exports, I suggest showing how it’s done in each case and explaining why Lago’s schema makes it easier.

Arguing that it’s harder on Stripe because if you’re DoorDash you would have to pay a lot of money for Sigma is not honest.

I'll reach out in DM re: invalid pricing assumptions (genuinely wand to gather feedback and iterate). Re: "how it's done with Lago" : I assume you've seen the SQL queries we shared as examples... but you still don't think it makes the point, what would have? https://github.com/getlago/lago/wiki/Stripe-Data-vs-Open%E2%...

Disclaimer: the example (for the sake of the article) is relatively simple, as it's our first article on this topic, but we're willing to go much deeper, so feedback/inputs are welcome.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com