Stripe is where the money lives, but Stripe's native dashboard is limited to payment data. It doesn't tell you about churn trends, customer health, ad ROI, or what's driving revenue changes. To answer those questions, you need your Stripe data flowing into an analytics platform.
This guide covers every option — from the simplest to the most customisable.
Option 1: Use a purpose-built tool (easiest)
The fastest path is connecting Stripe to an analytics platform that has a native Stripe integration. Tools like Fold Analytics, ChartMogul, or Baremetrics let you OAuth into Stripe in under 2 minutes and immediately start seeing MRR, churn, ARPU, and customer analytics.
How to connect Stripe to Fold Analytics
- Create a Fold account at usefold.io
- Go to Settings → Integrations → Stripe
- Click "Connect" — you'll be redirected to Stripe's OAuth flow
- Authorise read-only access (Fold never writes to your Stripe account)
- Fold starts syncing your historical data immediately
Within 5 minutes you'll see MRR, churn rate, at-risk customers, ARPU, and an AI-generated summary of your subscription health.
Option 2: Stripe Sigma (built into Stripe)
Stripe Sigma lets you run SQL queries directly against your Stripe data from inside the Stripe dashboard. It's powerful for ad-hoc analysis — "show me all customers who downgraded in October" — but requires SQL knowledge and doesn't give you dashboards or alerts.
Cost: $0.02 per query execution. Free for simple queries.
Option 3: Stripe webhooks → your own database
If you have engineering resources, Stripe's webhook system lets you receive real-time events (payment succeeded, subscription cancelled, invoice failed) and store them in your own database for custom analysis.
Key webhooks to listen for:
customer.subscription.created— new subscribercustomer.subscription.deleted— churn eventinvoice.payment_failed— involuntary churn riskcustomer.subscription.updated— upgrade or downgrade
This approach gives maximum flexibility but requires ongoing maintenance. Not recommended for founders without a dedicated engineering team.
Option 4: Zapier / Make automations
Tools like Zapier can pipe Stripe events into Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, or Slack. This is useful for simple notifications ("notify Slack when a new subscriber signs up") but doesn't give you analytics — you'd still need to build charts manually in Sheets.
Option 5: Fivetran / Airbyte → data warehouse
Enterprise-grade: Fivetran or Airbyte sync all Stripe data to a data warehouse (BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift) where your data team can run any query. This is the right approach at $1M+ ARR with a data team. Overkill before that.
What to look at once connected
- MRR trend: Is it growing, flat, or declining? What's driving each component?
- Monthly churn rate: Target under 2% for B2C, under 1% for B2B
- At-risk customers: Who hasn't been active recently and is likely to cancel?
- ARPU trends: Is your average revenue per user going up or down over time?
- Failed payment rate: Above 3% suggests a dunning problem
See your whole business in one dashboard.
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