Customers, subscriptions and statuses
Almost every metric in Chartsy comes down to counting the right subscriptions, and that depends entirely on which statuses you treat as live. This page defines the objects and then defines each status, so you can tell at a glance whether a number should include someone.
The objects
- Customer
- One paying entity in your provider. A customer can hold several subscriptions over time, so customer counts and subscription counts legitimately differ - and a returning customer who cancelled and came back is the same customer, not a new one.
- Subscription
- A recurring agreement between a customer and a plan, with a status, a billing interval, and an amount. This is the unit MRR is built from.
- Subscription item
- A line within a subscription - one product, at one price, with a quantity. Seat-based pricing lives here, which is why an upgrade can be a quantity change rather than a plan change.
- Plan / price
- The named tier and amount a subscription is on. Plan-level breakdowns in dashboards group by this.
- Invoice and charge
- The invoice is the bill; the charge is the payment attempt against it. A charge can fail while the subscription remains open, which is precisely the situation involuntary churn describes.
Subscription statuses
These come straight from your payment processor, unchanged. Chartsy does not reinterpret them, so a status here means exactly what it means in Stripe or Paddle.
- active
- Paying normally. Counts toward MRR and active customers.
- trialing
- In a trial period, not yet paying. Counted as a trial rather than as recurring revenue - an unpaid trial does not inflate MRR.
- past_due
- A payment failed and retries are still in progress. The subscription is alive but at risk; this is the population involuntary churn is recovered from.
- paused
- Deliberately suspended, expected to resume. Not churned, but not currently contributing revenue either.
- unpaid
- Retries have been exhausted without success. Effectively lost unless payment details are updated.
- incomplete
- The first payment never completed - often an authentication step the customer abandoned. The subscription never really started.
- incomplete_expired
- An incomplete subscription that timed out. It will not become active.
- canceled
- Ended, whether by the customer or by you. This is voluntary churn.
- never_paid
- The one status Chartsy adds itself, used in Growth. It marks a signup who never started a subscription at all. Your processor has no record of these people because they never reached it, but they matter enormously when judging a channel: a source that sends signups who never subscribe looks successful on signup counts alone.
Which statuses count as a customer
Active customer counts and MRR are built from subscriptions that are currently live and paying - principally active. Trials are reported separately so that trial growth never gets mistaken for revenue growth.
How trials are handled
A trial is tracked from the moment it starts, but it contributes no MRR until it converts and the first payment succeeds. That is deliberate: counting unconverted trials as revenue produces an MRR line that falls every time a trial cohort expires, for reasons that have nothing to do with your business performance.
Trial conversion rate - the share of trials that become paying subscriptions - is therefore its own metric, and it is one of the headline numbers in the Early-Stage SaaS template.
Upgrades, downgrades and cancellations
A change in what a customer pays becomes a movement in MRR: upward is expansion, downward is contraction, and leaving entirely is churn. Keeping the three separate is what lets you see that a flat MRR line can hide heavy expansion offset by heavy churn - two very different businesses that produce the same chart.
