MRR (Monthly recurring revenue)
MRR is the revenue your active subscriptions bring in each month, with yearly plans divided by twelve and one-off payments left out.
Worked example (made-up numbers)
You have 30 customers on a $19 monthly plan and 5 on a $180 yearly plan.
- Monthly plans: 30 × $19 = $570.
- Yearly plans: 5 × $180 ÷ 12 = $75.
- MRR: $645.
A $500 one-off setup fee paid this month is revenue, but not MRR: it won’t come again next month.
Why it matters when you’re starting out
MRR is the number that tells you whether the business is growing between one month and the next, without the noise of when invoices happen to land. It’s also how most founders talk to each other about progress, so it helps to calculate it the same way.
The total hides the story, though. Split it into:
- New MRR: from customers who started this month.
- Churned MRR: from customers who cancelled or downgraded.
- Net change: new minus churned, plus upgrades.
$645 MRR growing by $100 a month with $20 churned is a different business from $645 MRR growing by $100 with $90 churned.
How to measure it
- List your active subscriptions and what each pays per billing period.
- Turn every price into a monthly amount (yearly ÷ 12, quarterly ÷ 3).
- Apply running discounts; leave out one-off payments, taxes and refunds.
- Add them up per currency. Don’t add dollars to euros.
Tools differ in the details (coupons, trials, metered usage), so pick one definition and stick to it. MRR from two tools rarely matches to the dollar, and that’s fine as long as you compare a number with itself.
In Nordva Launch
Launch reads your Stripe subscriptions read-only and shows MRR per currency, the net change for the period and a chart of revenue by day; the API and the MCP server give new and churned MRR separately. Every plan can connect Stripe; the free plan reads 30 days of history.