Stripe is genuinely excellent software. Revenue data, MRR, payment volume, your latest charge, all updated in real time and presented clearly. For running payments, it's hard to beat.
But profit is a different question. And it needs its own answer.
This is why we built ProTally.
The question that comes next
At some point, every founder running a Stripe business hits the same moment. Numbers are going up. Customers are paying. Everything looks good.
Then someone asks: "But what are your margins like?"
And you pause.
You know your revenue. You know roughly what things cost. But the actual figure, what you kept after fees, after the cost of delivering the product, after everything, you don't have that. Not right now. Not per product. Not without opening a spreadsheet and doing some maths you're not fully confident in.
So you build the spreadsheet. You pull your Stripe data. You estimate your costs. You do the calculation. You get a number. Then you feel slightly unsure about it and leave the tab open for three days.
This is normal. We did it too.
The problem with spreadsheets for this
Spreadsheets are fine for one-off calculations. They fall apart when you need the number to stay current.
Your revenue changes every day. Your fees scale with it. If you're on usage-based pricing, your costs move too. By the time you've updated the spreadsheet, it's already out of date.
But the bigger issue isn't freshness, it's granularity. Spreadsheets show you the blended picture: total revenue minus total cost. That's useful for an end-of-month report. It's not useful when you're deciding which product to promote, which plan to retire, or whether your pricing is actually working.
What changes how you run the business is margin per product. Which plan is carrying you? Which one looks busy but barely covers its costs? You can't answer that from a total.
What we noticed
Tools for this existed: accounting platforms, financial dashboards, BI software. But they were either built for accountants (slow, manual, retrospective), or built for companies ten times the size (expensive, weeks to set up, still needing someone to maintain them).
There was nothing that just worked for a normal Stripe-powered business. Something that lived where you already were, understood your products without a complicated setup, and showed you the numbers without a three-week implementation.
So we built it.
What ProTally does
It's a native Stripe App. It runs inside your Stripe Dashboard, not in a separate tab you have to remember to open. You install it from the Stripe App Marketplace, connect your account, and tell it what each product costs to deliver. A flat amount, a per-unit cost, or something tiered if your pricing is more complex.
From there, it handles the rest. Every product. Every price point. Every period. Margin calculated automatically, sitting right alongside the revenue data you already look at.
No exports. No spreadsheet. No guessing.
The why, simply
We built ProTally because revenue without profit context is just a number. It feels good on a dashboard but it doesn't tell you if your business is sustainable, if your pricing is working, or which products deserve more attention.
Every business running on Stripe deserves to know what they actually keep. Not at the end of the quarter, not after someone's done a review, but right now, in the same place they already live.
That's it. That's the whole reason.
If that sounds useful, you can install ProTally from the Stripe App Marketplace. It takes a few minutes to get set up.