ProfitWell Blog
profitwell.com · Company blog · on HN since 2014
ProfitWell's blog, from a subscription metrics company later acquired by Paddle, covers SaaS pricing, churn, and growth data.
What HN saysCommenters mention ProfitWell mainly as a free subscription analytics tool for Stripe, and one raises its privacy policy.
16HN people shared it
5linked it in comments
15stories submitted
29story points
4 years agolast shared
2014people per year2026
Most-shared posts
- 1Homepage3 people · first shared 2015
- 2Paddle Acquires Profitwell2 people · 4 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 3Data on Freemium vs Free Trial1 people · 6 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 4You're probably calculating your SaaS MRR incorrectly. Here's why1 people · 6 points · first shared 2014 · discussion on HN
- 5ProfitWell Acquires BTMetrics1 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 6Venture funded companies have higher churn, less impact on growth1 people · 2 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 7How Do Bay Area Companies Compare to Those Outside It?1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 8Profitwell's New Podcast Tackles Mental Health1 people · 1 points · first shared 2020 · discussion on HN
- 9Unit Economics Metrics (2021)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 10How Does Founder Sleep Impact Company Growth? (2019)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 11The Disney Octopus1 people · 1 points · first shared 2021 · discussion on HN
- 12The rise of passive, anti-active usage products1 people · 1 points · first shared 2023 · discussion on HN
- 13Driving Higher NPS Benchmarks Report (Case Study – 28k Consumers Surveyed)1 people · 1 points · first shared 2018 · discussion on HN
- 14Lessons From 10,342 Blog Posts on Growth1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
- 15Paddle Acquires Profitwell for $200M1 people · 1 points · first shared 2022 · discussion on HN
What HN people wrote when they linked it
michaelisaok · 2019-08-01
ProfitWell (https://www.profitwell.com) | Backend (Python), Frontend (TypeScript/React), DevOps (Kubernetes) | Mid + Senior level | Boston, MA | Full Time | ONSITE
ProfitWell provides free subscription metrics to help you identify opportunities and then tools to help you reduce churn, optimize pricing, and grow your subscription business end-to-end.
We care a lot about building great products, but also about writing great software. We have high standards for our code, and everything to push goes through a rigorous code review. We're ok if it takes a little longer to get things right because we believe it leads to better products, better software, and happier engineers in the long term. There's obviously a tradeoff between speed and quality, and while we're always trying to find the sweet spot, we tend to err on the side of shipping well designed software.
Related to this, engineers are expected to give input on the product. It's not "here's a spec, go build exactly what it says." We think building great products is a "contact sport," meaning there's typically a lot of (respectful!) debate and refinement over the things we build before they reach their final form. This means pointing out the UI inconsistencies and UX awkwardness when starting to build out the frontend or coming up with novel ways to leverage the immense dataset we have on the backend to drive better outcomes for our customers.
We also do a lot of team activities here. Whether it's trivia or game nights,…
yokisan · 2017-02-20
For Stripe analytics, Profitwell is free. And awesome.
https://www.profitwell.com
aymeric · 2015-06-10
Or http://profitwell.com (it is free and gives me better metrics)
pccampbell · 2018-04-05
Hey Dictum - we're free for non-basic usage, basic usage, and everything in-between. I explained a lot of why this is the case in the blog post link below (when we went all in for free), but it really comes down to the following:
PHILOSOPHICAL
1. In software (and the subscription economy) we're moving away from function based pricing to outcome based pricing. Putting this simply in the context of analytics/reporting means that if I just take your data and put it into a bunch of graphs, it's helpful, but not valuable, even if they are the right graphs (and most of the time they aren't the right graphs, at least in most BI/analytics products).
2. Based on this, we believe in outcome based pricing. We make money by selling products like Retain, Price Intelligently, etc. that all have a specific number we can point to (in your free ProfitWell account :)) that we helped move in the right direction. For some of these products we then only perfectly charge based on our performance. Others where we can't measure this precisely, we still price on a value metric axis.
ANALYTICAL
1. Metrics/analytics are a terrible business from a willingness to pay and unit economics perspective. People don't really appreciate how much work goes into 100% accuracy (that's our thing compared to our competitors fwiw). It took years to be perfect and even now we're still finding edge cases of edge cases. Multiply this by the number of billing systems and it takes a lot of work to support this free…
dsacco · 2018-04-06
The silence is deafening. I’ll answer for Patrick; here is ProfitWell’s privacy policy:
https://www.profitwell.com/privacy-policy
The short answer to your question is, “Yes.” The long answer is:
> INFORMATION SHARING
1. With Third Parties:
We may share your information with third-party business partners...
...
2. With Service Providers:
We may share your information with third parties who provide services on our behalf...to which these services may include:
Payment processing
Providing customer service
Sending marketing communications
Conducting research and analysis
Providing cloud computing infrastructure
...which also means, “Yes.” In particular, “research and analysis” is not clarified (nor would a clarification outside the formal ToS be legally binding). As long as there is a defensible interpretation of these clauses, they can freely sell all of your information. This also might be of interest to you:
> We will respond to your request within a reasonable timeframe. In certain circumstances we may be required by law to retain your personal information, or may need to retain your personal information in order to continue providing a service.
There is a legitimate reading of this clause which allows ProfitWell to retain your data indefinitely because they’re providing a service to someone.