Frequently asked questions

Gleam connects to your Stripe account and calculates the SaaS metrics Stripe's own dashboard doesn't surface: real MRR, ARR, churn rate, and the full MRR movement breakdown: new, expansion, contraction, reactivation, and churned. It takes a daily snapshot of your revenue, emails you a plain-English summary every morning, and gives you a dashboard with a churn feed, individual customer detail pages, and a month-end forecast. Think of it as the numbers page you open before you get out of bed.

Gleam uses Stripe Connect OAuth, the same mechanism Stripe uses for its own partner integrations. You click “Connect Stripe,” authorise the connection in Stripe's own UI, and Gleam immediately starts an initial sync of your subscription data. No API keys to copy and paste, no Stripe dashboard configuration. The whole process takes about 2 minutes, and your first daily digest lands the next morning.

No. Gleam only ever reads your data. Stripe's OAuth protocol grants read-write permissions by default (Stripe doesn't offer a read-only scope for standard Connect apps), but Gleam never makes any write calls to your Stripe account. We maintain an automated test suite that fails the build if any write call is ever introduced into the codebase. Gleam will never create, modify, cancel, refund, or delete anything in your Stripe account.

Stripe's dashboard shows gross volume and revenue, but it doesn't calculate MRR the way a SaaS investor or finance team would define it. Gleam reads the actual prices on your active subscriptions, not invoice amounts, so mid-cycle upgrades are classified as expansion rather than new revenue, and metered billing add-ons that aren't truly recurring are excluded. It also separates your MRR into distinct buckets: new, expansion, contraction, and churned. Stripe conflates all of these; Gleam keeps them apart so you know exactly what moved your number.

Every plan includes MRR, ARR, active subscriber count, 30-day churn rate, a month-end MRR forecast, and a churn feed with individual customer records showing subscription history, LTV, tenure, and cancellation reason.

Pro and Team plans add: MRR broken down by pricing plan or tier, a full MRR waterfall chart (new / expansion / contraction / churn), 90-day MRR history instead of 30, and trial expiry warnings so you can reach out before a customer churns.

Once per day, at the hour you configure (default 8am in your local timezone), Gleam emails you a summary of the previous day. It includes your current MRR, who churned, how many new subscribers signed up, and whether the month-end forecast has moved. The email is designed to be read in 15 seconds: no charts, no clicking through to a dashboard. It's one signal: are things up, flat, or down, and who specifically moved?

Gleam tracks several types of negative MRR events separately. A full cancellation counts as churned MRR. A plan downgrade or reduction in seats counts as contraction MRR, not churn. A subscription pause is recorded as its own event type. All of these appear in the churn feed with the customer's name, email, LTV, and tenure, so you can see exactly what happened and act on it. Gleam intentionally separates contraction from churn because they're different problems with different causes and different responses.

Yes. The Starter plan supports one Stripe account. Pro supports up to three, and Team supports unlimited Stripe accounts. Each account gets its own dashboard and its own MRR calculations; they're not blended together. Multi-user access for shared team dashboards is a Team plan feature, so multiple team members can log in and see the same data.

If you disconnect Stripe, Gleam stops syncing new data but preserves all your historical MRR snapshots, churn events, and customer records. Your charts stay intact; they just stop updating until you reconnect. Syncing resumes the moment you reconnect.

If you cancel your Gleam subscription, your data is retained for 30 days in case you want to reactivate. After that, you can request full deletion at any time by emailing hello@gleamrevenue.com.

Starter ($29/month) is one Stripe account with 30 days of MRR history, the churn feed, daily digest, and month-end forecast: everything a solo operator needs to stay on top of their numbers.

Pro ($59/month) adds up to three Stripe accounts, full MRR history, MRR breakdown by product, the waterfall chart, and trial expiry warnings. Designed for teams who want to understand exactly where MRR is moving.

Team ($99/month) is for companies with multiple products or distributed teams: unlimited Stripe accounts, multi-user access, and priority support.

All plans include a 14-day free trial with no credit card required.

MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) is the normalized monthly value of your active subscriptions. ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) is simply MRR × 12, the same number, scaled to a year. Watch MRR day to day: it's the number that actually moves when a customer signs up, churns, upgrades, or downgrades, and it's what your daily digest and dashboard are built around. Save ARR for board decks and annual planning, where an investor or team member thinks in yearly terms.

Yes. Gleam normalizes every subscription's price to its monthly-equivalent value regardless of billing interval: a $1,200/year plan contributes $100 to MRR, not $1,200 in the month it renews. This is exactly the calculation Stripe's own dashboard doesn't do: Stripe shows the full invoice amount when an annual plan renews, which distorts month-to-month revenue comparisons. Gleam's MRR figure stays consistent whether a customer is on a monthly, quarterly, or annual plan.

Metered and usage-based subscriptions are flagged and excluded from MRR, since usage isn't a fixed recurring commitment the way a subscription price is: it can vary month to month with no churn or downgrade event involved. Including it would make your MRR figure look more predictable than it actually is. If your business mixes fixed subscriptions with usage-based add-ons, only the fixed portion counts toward MRR.

Customer and subscription changes sync from Stripe as they happen, typically within minutes of an event like a new signup or cancellation, via Stripe's webhook system. Your MRR snapshot (the daily total, movement breakdown, and forecast) is computed once per day. So the churn feed and customer records update near-real-time, while the headline MRR number and charts refresh once daily, which keeps the trend lines stable and readable rather than jumping around during the day.

The forecast is a linear projection based on your current MRR and recent growth rate, projected out to the end of the month. It comes with a confidence level (low, medium, or high) based on how much historical data is available for your account. A brand-new account with a few days of history gets a low-confidence forecast; an account with months of consistent data gets a higher-confidence one. It's meant as a directional signal for planning, not a guarantee.

Your customer and subscription records (LTV, tenure, payment history) come directly from Stripe and go back as far as your Stripe account's own history. Your daily MRR chart, movement breakdown, and forecast start accumulating from the day you connect, since those are computed and snapshotted by Gleam rather than pulled retroactively from Stripe. Starter shows the last 30 days of MRR history; Pro and Team show up to 90 days.

No. Gleam never asks for your Stripe secret key. Connection happens entirely through Stripe Connect OAuth, the same flow Stripe uses for its own verified partner integrations, so you authorize access inside Stripe's own interface rather than copying and pasting a key into a third-party dashboard. If a tool asks you to paste a Stripe secret key directly, that's a different (and less secure) integration model than the one Gleam uses.

There's no separate native app: Gleam's dashboard is built mobile-first, so it works fully in your phone's browser without needing to install anything. Combined with the daily email digest, most users end up checking their numbers from their phone more than from a desktop dashboard.