Your spreadsheet says what you put into it. mrrsucks says what Stripe put into it.
"A free, endlessly customizable revenue tracking system where you control the formulas, the views, and the narrative — because nobody knows your business better than you and your spreadsheet."
"Your spreadsheet shows $4,200 MRR. Your Stripe dashboard shows $3,840. Somewhere between the formula and the feeling, $360 went missing."
Spreadsheets exist for revenue tracking because they are free, flexible, and familiar — and for a founder early in their journey, "works now and costs nothing" is often the right answer. A well-designed spreadsheet can track MRR, churn, LTV, and cohort metrics with a level of customization that no off-the-shelf product can match. For finance-minded founders, building the spreadsheet is also a forcing function for thinking clearly about their unit economics.
There is also something to be said for the intimacy of a spreadsheet — you built the formulas, you understand the logic, you know where the bodies are buried. That intimacy creates a kind of ownership that SaaS dashboards and AI tools cannot replicate.
The spreadsheet model breaks on two failure modes. The first is update frequency: most founders update their revenue spreadsheet irregularly, usually right before a call or meeting when they need to look like they know their numbers. The weeks in between are invisible. Daily accountability requires daily data, and manual systems do not sustain daily discipline at scale.
The second failure mode is input honesty. A spreadsheet accepts whatever you type. "MRR this week: $2,400" goes into the cell even if Stripe shows $2,100 and you rounded up "because of the pipeline." mrrsucks reads from Stripe. The cell does not have an opinion. The API does.
Automation is not just convenience here — it removes the human from the loop at the point where human self-interest distorts the data. The number in mrrsucks is the number. Not the number you felt like reporting.
If you love spreadsheets and have the discipline to update them daily, they are excellent. The customization is genuinely valuable. The problem is that "if you have the discipline to update them daily" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Use mrrsucks for the automated daily ground truth, and use your spreadsheet for the deeper analysis you actually want to do on the correct numbers.
the mrrsucks take
The spreadsheet was last updated nine days ago. The formulas are solid. The data is stale. The business made decisions based on a snapshot from before whatever happened last week happened.
Create a date-series table with monthly revenue entries. Calculate MRR as the sum of active subscription charges. Track month-over-month change. Maintain a churn log separately. Or — connect Stripe to mrrsucks and get this automatically every morning.
Manual systems require consistent discipline. Most people update them before important meetings, not daily. That means the data reflects when you felt like looking at it, not what actually happened.
For daily accountability and automated tracking, yes. For custom financial modeling, projections, and unit economics analysis, no. Use mrrsucks for the daily number. Use the spreadsheet for the quarterly analysis.
more_comparisons
$9. 365 roasts. one public endpoint of pure shame.