Glossary

Every term Chartsy uses, in one sentence each. Where a term deserves more than a sentence, the entry links to the page that gives it.

A

Active customer
A distinct customer with a live, paying subscription. Trials are reported separately.
Allowed domains
The domains registered for a tracked site. A visit from anywhere else is refused rather than counted.
ARPU
Average revenue per user: MRR divided by active customers.
ARR
Annual recurring revenue: MRR multiplied by twelve. A restatement, not a separate measurement.
Attribution
Assigning a customer, and the revenue they generate, to the marketing channel that produced them.

B

Backfill
The one-time initial read of your full history when a data source is first connected.
Bot traffic
Automated requests identifying as crawlers. Rejected before a visit is recorded, so it never consumes usage.

C

Campaign
An optional sub-label under a source, splitting one channel into more specific efforts.
Chart
One metric plotted against one dimension. A question with a picture attached.
Churn rate
The share of customers (customer churn) or of revenue (revenue churn) lost in a period.
Churned MRR
Recurring revenue lost from customers who left entirely during the period.
Concentration risk
The condition where an outsized share of net MRR depends on a single channel or customer.
Contraction MRR
Recurring revenue lost from customers who stayed - a downgrade or reduced quantity.

D

Daily briefing
The summary of today’s MRR, subscribers, churn, renewals and failed payments shown when you open the chatbot.
Dashboard
A saved arrangement of charts that recalculates on its own against fresh data.
Data model
One object type Chartsy copies from a data source - customers, subscriptions, invoices, charges.
Data source
The external account Chartsy reads from: Stripe, Paddle, Paddle Classic, or BigCommerce.
Dimension
The axis a metric is broken down by - time, plan, country, or a metadata field.
Direct
A visit with no identifiable channel. Counted honestly as direct rather than forced into a bucket.

E

Event
A tracked visit or a tracked signup on one of your sites. A visit is closer to a session than a pageview. The unit your usage is measured in.
Expansion MRR
Additional recurring revenue from existing customers - an upgrade, a seat added.

F

First touch
The very first source ever recorded for a visitor. Answers what made them aware of you.
Funnel
The Visits → Signups → Paid progression, and the conversion rate between each pair of stages.

G

GDPR mode
A connection mode where no personally identifying fields are sent to Chartsy servers, while every metric still works.
Gross revenue
All money collected in a period, recurring and one-off, before refunds.
Growth
The Chartsy feature that ties marketing channels to real Stripe or Paddle revenue.

I

Instance
One occurrence of a repeated channel under the same source and campaign - a single launch attempt or email batch.
Involuntary churn
Cancellation caused by a failed payment rather than a decision to leave. Often recoverable.

L

Last touch
The source credited with the visit immediately preceding an action. Answers what brought them back.
Launch
An optionally pre-registered record giving a source/campaign pair a friendly display name and a cost figure.
Lifetime revenue
The actual total a customer or channel has paid to date. Nothing projected.
LTV
Lifetime value: the revenue an average customer is expected to generate, estimated from ARPU and churn.

M

Metadata
Custom key/value fields on Stripe or Paddle objects, turned by Chartsy into filters and breakdowns.
Metric
A number produced by a formula over your records, rather than a field stored in your provider.
MRR
Monthly recurring revenue: the normalised monthly value of all currently recurring subscriptions.

N

Net MRR
New + expansion − contraction − churned. Whether recurring revenue actually grew.
Net revenue
Gross revenue after refunds and chargebacks, applied in the period they occur.
Net revenue retention
What an existing cohort is worth now versus at the start, including expansion. Above 100% means it grows unaided.
never_paid
A Chartsy-specific status for a signup who never started a subscription at all.
New MRR
Recurring revenue from customers who had none in the previous period.

R

Retention curve
The share of a signup cohort still subscribed at each month afterwards.

S

Signup event
The call marking the moment a visitor becomes an account. It counts as one event, separately from the visit that preceded it.
Source
A traffic origin such as product_hunt, google or twitter, taken from UTM parameters or referrer data.
Subscription
A recurring agreement between a customer and a plan, with a status, interval, and amount.
Subscription item
One line within a subscription: a product, a price, and a quantity. Seat-based pricing lives here.
Sync
The ongoing process keeping Chartsy’s copy of your records in step with your provider.

T

Template
A pre-built dashboard laid out for a specific job, which fills with your own data immediately.
Trial conversion rate
The share of trials that become paying subscriptions.

V

Verdict banner
The auto-generated sentence at the top of the Growth overview summarising the period.
Visit
A tracked session on one of your sites, open for about 30 minutes and refreshed by each page load. One visit is one event.

Missing a term? Tell us and we will add it.

Chartsy Team

Written by

Chartsy Team

The Chartsy Team writes guides, product updates, and resources to help SaaS and eCommerce founders make sense of their metrics, without SQL or spreadsheets.

Chartsy
Ministry of Economy and Innovation
Startup Albania

The Chartsy program is realized with the financial support of the Albanian Government through the Ministry of Economy and Innovation, under the Grant 2026 scheme, and is implemented by the Innovation4Albania Agency.