Interpreting Stripe Subscriptions

On Stripe, Subscriptions have statuses that reflect if a Customer’s recurring payments are in good standing or not. SaaSGrid primarily uses Subscription statuses in its calculations.

You can read more about Stripe Subscription statuses here.

Status

Description

Note

The Subscription is in good standing and the most recent payment is successful. It’s safe to provision your product for your customer.

Active subscriptions should always be added in MRR. 


SaaSGrid automatically adds Subscriptions with Active statuses into MRR because Active statuses indicate the most recent payment was successful, meaning future payments are also expected to be completed.

Payment on the latest finalized invoice either failed or wasn’t attempted. The Subscription continues to create invoices. Your Subscription settings determine the Subscription’s next state. If the invoice is still unpaid after all Smart Retries have been attempted, you can configure the Subscription to move to canceled, unpaid, or leave it as past_due. To move the Subscription to active, pay the most recent invoice before its due date.

You could choose to include Past Due subscriptions if you feel payments will eventually be fulfilled. 

The latest invoice hasn’t been paid but the Subscription remains in place. The latest invoice remains open and invoices continue to be generated but payments aren’t attempted. You should revoke access to your product when the Subscription is unpaid since payments were already attempted and retried when it was past_due. To move the Subscription to active, pay the most recent invoice before its due date.

You could choose to include Unpaid subscriptions if you feel payments will eventually be fulfilled.

The Subscription has been canceled. During cancellation, automatic collection for all unpaid invoices is disabled (auto_advance=false). This is a terminal state that can’t be updated.

We recommend you do not include canceled subscriptions into MRR. 

A successful payment needs to be made within 23 hours to activate the Subscription. Or the payment requires action, like customer authentication. Read more about payments that require action. Subscriptions can also be incomplete if there’s a pending payment. In that case, the invoice status would be open_payment_pending and the PaymentIntent status would be processing.

We recommend you do not include incomplete subscriptions into MRR. 

The initial payment on the Subscription failed and no successful payment was made within 23 hours of creating the Subscription. These Subscriptions don’t bill customers. This status exists so you can track customers that failed to activate their Subscriptions.

We recommend you do not include incomplete expired subscriptions into MRR. 

The Subscription is currently in a trial period and it’s safe to provision your product for your customer. The Subscription transitions automatically to active when the first payment is made.

We do not include trialing subscriptions in SaaSGrid.


Any subscription still in a trialing status does not count towards your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), as the subscription is not active and there is no predictable revenue for that customer.