Bastle vs ProfitWell Metrics

Free is a real answer

ProfitWell Metrics has been free for years, from a company with an installed base and a support organisation, and it produces the core subscription metrics correctly. If your requirement is "show me MRR and churn, cost nothing, and do not make me think about it", that requirement is met and you can stop reading. Bastle is also free right now, but free while in beta is a different sort of promise and you should weigh it as one.

The benchmark dataset is the other thing they have that we do not. It draws on tens of thousands of companies, which is enough for a peer median to mean something. Bastle's benchmarks are on the roadmap and will stay there until enough workspaces have opted in, because a cohort assembled from too few companies produces a median that moves when one of them has a bad month, and a comparison built on that is worse than no comparison because it feels authoritative.

The Paddle question

ProfitWell was acquired by Paddle, which is a merchant of record and a direct competitor to Stripe. That has produced a durable unease among Stripe-billing users, who reasonably note that their free analytics tool is now operated by a company with a commercial interest in them switching processors. Nothing in this is an accusation — the product works — but it is a structural conflict, and a widely observed sentiment that Stripe-first users have been deprioritised since the acquisition.

Bastle does not sell payments and has no position on where you bill. That is worth exactly as much as you think it is worth.

Freshness and fixed definitions

ProfitWell's metrics refresh on a multi-hour cycle. For monthly reporting that is fine. For watching a launch, a pricing change or an incident, a dashboard that is up to several hours stale is the wrong instrument. Bastle streams billing events continuously and recomputes against them, and every event carries both a business time and an ingest time so a backdated correction lands in the period it belongs to rather than the day it arrived.

The bigger structural difference is configurability. ProfitWell's metric definitions are fixed. Bastle's are workspace policy — the delinquency window, whether trials count as revenue, how full-discount coupons are treated, the separate annual churn lookback — and changing one recalculates your whole history against the new rule with a record of the change. When your CFO and your analytics tool disagree about what churn means, exactly one of those two can be edited.

Retention

Retain is a good dunning product and its automatic localisation across more than fifteen languages is something Bastle's Recover does not do — our messages are the copy you write, in the languages you write it. What Bastle does differently is include recovery rather than pricing it as a performance cut on money you get back, and cover three distinct failure modes separately: payments that have already failed, cards about to expire, and annual renewals about to land. Card-expiry warnings are the cheapest recovery available because no payment has failed yet.

Who wrote this page

Bastle did, and Bastle benefits if you choose Bastle. That is a bias no amount of good intent removes, so the useful thing is to make it checkable rather than to claim it away. Every capability claim above is specific enough to disprove in an afternoon, the case for the other product gets the same room as the case for ours, and anything that works differently rather than not at all is marked partial.

Read this alongside the other vendor's own documentation, not instead of it. If something here is wrong about their product, tell us: corrections are treated as bugs rather than as debate, the page gets fixed and its research date is reset so you can see it was revised. That applies whether the correction makes them look better or us look worse.