Stripe does a great job of showing you how much money came in. MRR, ARR, payment volume, it's all there and updated constantly. Revenue tracking at this level is genuinely useful.
Profit is the next question. And it needs its own answer.
Revenue and profit are different things
When a customer pays you $49/month, Stripe records $49. After processing fees, you receive a payout. But that payout is still your revenue, not your profit. The cost of actually delivering that $49 subscription comes on top of that. For most businesses it includes some combination of:
- Cloud hosting allocated per customer or plan tier
- Third-party APIs you pay per-customer (email, SMS, AI inference)
- The cost of goods if you ship something physical
- Payment processing fees on every charge
Subtract all of that, and your $49 plan might return $38. Or $22. Or, in some cases, less than zero.
Why margin matters more than revenue
Two products can have identical revenue and completely different margins. A $299 annual plan and a $29 monthly plan both generate similar amounts over 12 months, but the annual plan might carry a 78% gross margin while the monthly plan, with higher churn-related friction, sits at 41%.
That difference changes everything: which plan you promote, how you price, where you invest.
Gross margin at the product level
Most finance tools calculate margin at the business level. Total revenue minus total cost. That's useful for reporting but not for decisions.
What changes pricing decisions is margin per product or per price point. Knowing that your annual plan carries the business while your monthly plan is barely worth offering is actionable. Knowing your blended margin is 62% is not.
This is what ProTally is built to show you. Margin at the product and price level, automatically, inside your Stripe Dashboard.