Is a $490 revenue leak report worth it?

The $490 Revenue Leak Report is worth it if the report is likely to show a leak that costs you more per month than it costs once, and if you have enough customers for the numbers to mean something. I cannot promise your result. What I can do is show you how to check the arithmetic yourself before you pay.

What exactly do you get for $490?

You get a two-page report built from your own Stripe data, delivered within 48 hours of my receiving a restricted read-only key. It puts failed payments not recovered, trials that did not convert, cancellations with no save attempt and downgrades into dollars per month. It names the top three fixes and what a 90-day pilot would measure at your volume. Nothing in your account is changed.

It is not a retention tool and it does not send anything to your customers. It is a measurement. If you want to see what that looks like on paper, open the sample report. Its company, customers and amounts are synthetic.

How do I check whether it pays for itself?

Start with the question the report answers: how many dollars a month do you leak? You do not need the report to estimate the order of magnitude. Do this on the back of an envelope:

1. Take your monthly recurring revenue from your Stripe dashboard.
2. Guess the share you lose each month to failed payments you never recover, to customers who cancel without being asked why, and to plan downgrades.
3. Multiply. That is the monthly leak you are guessing at.
4. Divide $490 by that figure. The result is how many months of the leak the report costs.

The weak step is the guess in step 2. I do not have a benchmark for it, and I am wary of anyone who offers one without seeing your account. In my fictional sample the realised leak is $2,789 a month on $80,330 of recurring revenue, but that is a made-up company and says nothing about yours. The report replaces the guess with a count.

What if the report shows I have no big leak?

Then you have paid $490 to learn that, and that is a real result. It would tell you which of the three areas to leave alone and, usually, which of the four buckets is small. I would rather you learn that from a count than spend months building a cancel flow for a problem that turned out to be mostly card failures.

The honest limit: the report cannot tell you that a fix will work. It tells you where the money went. Proving that a change recovers money needs a test, which is what the pilot does with a holdout group.

When is it not worth it?

I would not buy it, and I tell people the same, in three cases:

• You have fewer than roughly 2,000 paying customers. There are too few events in each bucket to say much, and a spreadsheet will do. See DIY, a report or retention software: how to choose.
• You do not bill through Stripe. The tool reads Stripe only.
• You will not act on it. A report that sits in a folder is $490 of nothing.

What does it cost me besides the $490?

A few minutes of your time. You create a restricted key in your Stripe dashboard, give it read access to customers, subscriptions, invoices and charges and refunds, and send it through a one-time secret link. I also ask which currency you bill in, whether you already send failed-payment emails or have a cancel flow, and what name to put on the report. Those questions make the caveats checkable. The step-by-step is in how to create the restricted key.

How much of the report can I check myself?

Most of it. I did that on purpose. The second page of every report gives the computation for each number and its caveat. For example, recovery rate is recovered invoices divided by recovered plus lost among failed invoices that are no longer in retry. Involuntary churn is a cancelled subscription with at least one paid invoice and either the cancellation reason payment_failed or a last invoice that failed, was never recovered and was followed by cancellation within 45 days. You can compare the active recurring revenue in the report with the figure in your own dashboard. I check that it is within about 10% before I send anything, and I stop and ask you if it is not.

What happens after the report?

You decide. You can act on the three fixes yourself. You can ask me questions. Or you can start a 90-day pilot: $1,500 setup plus 20% of measured net uplift, tested against a 20% holdout group that gets nothing from me. If there is no uplift, there is no percentage. The pilot is optional, and the report does not obligate you to it. I describe the pricing mechanics in how a pay-on-uplift retention pilot works.

What is my recommendation?

If you are above roughly 2,000 paying customers, bill through Stripe and have never put your leaks in dollars, it is a cheap way to find out. If you are below that size, do the envelope version above and see whether the number is large enough to justify more work. Either way, put a number on it before you decide what to build.