What is a revenue leak report, and what does it show?

A revenue leak report is a read-only analysis of your billing history that puts the money you lose from failed payments, cancellations, downgrades and unconverted trials into dollars per month. It does not change anything in your account. Mine reads Stripe through a restricted key and is delivered within 48 hours of receiving the key.

What is a revenue leak?

A revenue leak is recurring revenue that you had, or could reasonably have had, and did not keep. The word "leak" matters: it is not a single event but a steady loss that is easy to miss because each piece is small. One card fails, one customer cancels, one plan gets cheaper. None of them trigger an alarm. Added up over a year, they are a number worth knowing.

I separate leaks into groups because each group has a different fix. If you add them all into one "churn" figure, you cannot tell which job to do first.

Which leaks does the report cover?

The report you buy shows four leaks, each in dollars per month:

• Failed payments not recovered: invoices whose first attempt failed and that ended up lost.
• Trials that did not convert: trials that ended without a single paid invoice.
• Cancellations with no save attempt: customers who chose to cancel, with no discount or pause visible in Stripe before they left.
• Downgrades: the fall in recurring monthly value between consecutive paid invoices.

Behind those four, my tool computes five buckets, because involuntary churn (card failures that ended the subscription) is counted on its own so that it is never counted twice. It also reports a recovery rate, the monthly revenue at risk right now, and the top three fixes with the mechanism for each. The second page explains how every number is computed and what could make it wrong.

Is every leak a loss?

No, and this is the part I am strictest about. Failed payments, cancellations and downgrades are realised: the money actually left. Unconverted trials are potential. Some of those people would never have paid, so I show that figure beside the headline and keep it out of it. If you add potential to realised you get a bigger number that you cannot defend in front of your finance person.

I wrote more about this split in unconverted trials: what are they worth.

How does the report get its numbers?

From Stripe, and only from Stripe. You create a restricted key with read access to customers, subscriptions, invoices, charges and refunds. The tool sends only read requests, writes nothing to your account, and does not save the raw data. It looks back over 365 days, or the real age of the account if it is younger, with a floor of 30 days so a monthly average is not inflated.

Each subscription is valued at its monthly recurring value: list price times quantity, with yearly and weekly plans converted to a month. The headline is the sum of the realised buckets over the window divided by the months observed. No industry benchmark is used anywhere. I would rather show you your own number than compare you with an average I cannot source.

If you want to see the setup before you create a key, read how to create a restricted read-only Stripe key.

What does the output look like?

It is two pages. Page one has the headline in dollars per month, the buckets, the split between involuntary and voluntary cancellations, the recovery rate, the revenue at risk now, the top three fixes and what a 90-day pilot would measure. Page two has the method and caveats for each number, plus the largest at-risk accounts with email addresses masked.

My sample report uses a fictional company, Lumenfold Analytics, with synthetic data that I generated so the right answer is known. In it the four realised buckets add up to $2,789 a month, with $989 a month of potential from trials shown separately. Those figures are made up. They are there so you can see the layout, not so you can compare yourself to them. The full thing is at the sample report.

What can the report not see?

Stripe knows billing, and the report is only as complete as that. These are the limits I state to every customer:

• Saves made by email, in-app messages or your support team are invisible, so "no visible save" is an upper bound.
• Values use list price times quantity, not what you collected after coupons.
• Currencies other than USD are excluded unless we agree a rate.
• Cancellations handled in another billing system do not appear.
• It covers one account, not marketplace child accounts.

I go through these in more depth in what a Stripe export cannot tell you.

Who is it for?

Stripe subscription businesses with roughly 2,000 or more paying customers: SaaS, AI tools and DTC subscriptions. Below that, there are often too few events per bucket for the numbers to say much. If you are smaller and unsure, ask me and I will tell you before you pay.

What does it cost, and what happens after?

The report is $490, delivered within 48 hours of my receiving the restricted key. You can revoke the key as soon as the report is delivered. A report is a read of history. It does not prove that any fix will work. If you want to test the fixes, I run a 90-day pilot that is measured against a holdout group, and it is a separate decision.