Free Subscription Analytics (2026): Where Every Free Tier Ends

The Short Answer

Three tools are genuinely free above $10,000 MRR, and only one of them shows up in the roundups. ProfitWell Metrics is free at any revenue, forever — that one everybody names. Grid, formerly SaaSGrid, is free on its Starter plan for companies under $1M ARR, roughly eight times ChartMogul's $10,000 MRR ceiling, and it barely appears in this conversation. And Lago is free to self-host under AGPLv3 at any scale, which is a different kind of free with a different bill attached.

The second finding is the one that changes decisions. Free tiers in this category are denominated in three incompatible units, and the unit — not the headline — determines what happens when you grow. SaaS analytics tools set a ceiling in MRR or ARR and switch to a fixed monthly fee above it, so crossing the line is a step change. Mobile subscription platforms set a floor in tracked revenue and charge a percentage above it, so crossing is barely noticeable and the pain arrives three years later at scale. And "free forever" means the vendor is monetising something else — usually your data's proximity to its paid products.

This piece uses published prices from the seventeen live listings in our verified subscription analytics directory, each recorded against the vendor's own pricing page with a check date. We sell none of them.

Three Kinds of Free

Before the numbers, the taxonomy, because it explains why comparing "free plans" across this category produces nonsense.

Notice that rows one and two are not variations on a theme — they behave oppositely. A ceiling protects you until a specific moment and then stops entirely. A floor charges you a little from early on and keeps scaling forever. If you are choosing between a Stripe-billed SaaS tool and a mobile platform you are not choosing between two prices, you are choosing between two shapes.

Every Free Tier and Its Exact Ceiling

The number the roundups omit is in the middle column. The number that decides whether the free tier matters is on the right.

Two entries in that table deserve pulling out because they are consistently mis-stated elsewhere.

Grid's $1M ARR ceiling is the most generous free tier in SaaS analytics and almost nobody mentions it. The Starter plan includes ARR, retention, expense and headcount metrics, custom shareable dashboards and unlimited viewers, with Stripe, QuickBooks, Xero and spreadsheet integrations. The catch is integration depth rather than metric depth: Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite and Sage Intacct, plus pipeline, renewals, TCV metrics and bookings-to-billings reconciliation, all sit on the custom-quoted Growth plan. If your stack is Stripe plus a spreadsheet — which describes most companies under $1M ARR — that limitation costs you nothing.

Superwall splits its product in two and gives half of it away permanently. Subscription infrastructure — server-computed entitlements synced from App Store Server Notifications V2 and Google Real-Time Developer Notifications, purchase APIs with receipt validation, webhooks, revenue analytics and SQL access — is free at any scale. Only the paywall product meters, at 1% of revenue actually converted through a Superwall paywall, and free below $10,000 a month of that. Revenue that does not convert through a Superwall paywall is never billed, which is a materially different promise from a percentage of all tracked revenue. The vendor's own worked example: $50,000 a month in revenue with half of it converting through Superwall paywalls costs $250 a month.

Worked Example: The Month You Cross $10K MRR

A B2B SaaS company billing through Stripe sits at $9,200 MRR and grows 6% a month — unremarkable for a company at that size. Here is the first year, priced four ways.

Three things fall out of that table.

The free tier bought two months. Measured against paying $59 from month zero, ChartMogul's free plan saves this company $118 over the year. Measured against the competitor that has no free tier at all, it saves nothing: Baremetrics charges $49 a month on annual billing across the whole Launch band ($0–$360K ARR), which is $588 for the same twelve months — $2 less than the free plan costs. A $2 difference over a year is not a reason to choose a vendor. If you are within 20% of a free ceiling, treat the free tier as a trial with no expiry date rather than as a saving, and choose on the things that are genuinely hard to change later.

Grid stays free for another three years. The same company reaches $1M ARR — $83,333 MRR — in month 38 at 6% monthly growth. That is not a marginally better free tier; it is a different category of offer, and it is the single most useful fact in this article for a company under $1M ARR whose billing runs through Stripe.

The cliff is small in absolute terms and that is the point. $59 a month at $10,337 MRR is 0.57% of revenue. Nobody churns over it. What it does do is remove the reason people picked the tool, which is why the interesting question is not "when does it start charging" but "what am I locked into when it does." ChartMogul's Starter plan caps the team at three members and scales from $59 to $707 a month by ARR band up to $10M ARR; the Pro plan at $99 to $1,199 lifts the team cap and allows five billing-system connections rather than one. The team-member cap, not the price, is what pushes companies from Starter to Pro — and it is invisible at the moment you sign up for free. Substitute your own growth rate with our percentage calculator or compound interest calculator; monthly compounding is the same arithmetic.

For the head-to-head on what you get for those fees rather than what you pay, we compared the three standalone tools directly in Baremetrics vs ChartMogul and ChartMogul vs ProfitWell.

Mobile Prices on a Floor, Not a Ceiling

If your revenue arrives through the App Store and Google Play, everything above changes shape. The four mobile platforms in our directory bundle analytics into purchase infrastructure and charge a percentage of tracked revenue above a free floor — and those floors differ by a factor of four.

Take an app at $2,300 monthly tracked revenue growing at the same 6% a month.

An app that would pay RevenueCat $341 in its first year pays the other three nothing, from identical revenue. That is a real difference for a solo developer, and it is invisible in any comparison that reports all four as "has a free tier."

The flip side arrives later, and it is worth modelling before you commit, because switching in-app purchase infrastructure is a client-side migration rather than a dashboard change:

At a million a month in tracked revenue the spread between 1% and 0.6% is $48,000 a year, and neither vendor's free tier had anything to do with it. Two qualifications keep this honest. First, tracked revenue is measured pre-platform-cut at RevenueCat and Adapty, so the percentage applies to the gross number before Apple or Google take theirs. Second, these are not equivalent products at that scale — enterprise tiers at all three are custom-quoted with volume discounts, and RevenueCat's Growth Tools option charges 1% only on Paywalls and web-to-app Funnels conversions rather than on all MTR. We compared what the money buys in RevenueCat vs Adapty vs Superwall.

The Bill That Is Not in the Table

Every free tier ends for one of two reasons, and only one of them is revenue.

Seat and connection caps are what actually force the upgrade. ChartMogul's free plan and its $59 Starter both allow one billing-system connection and cap the team at three members; Pro at $99 to $1,199 raises that to five connections and unlimited members, and Enterprise to fifteen. Grid's free Starter reads Stripe, QuickBooks, Xero and spreadsheets, and stops there — Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite and Sage Intacct are Growth-plan features. So the company that upgrades is usually not the one that grew past a revenue line. It is the one that hired a fourth person who needed a login, or acquired a product billing through a second system, or moved enterprise invoices out of the billing stack. None of that appears on the pricing page you read when you signed up, and all of it is more predictable than your growth rate. Check the connection count and the seat cap before the MRR ceiling; they arrive first.

Free to self-host is free of licence fees only. Lago's open-source edition genuinely has no revenue ceiling, and for a team that already runs infrastructure it can be the cheapest serious option in the category. Two things to price in anyway. The first is operational: hosting, upgrades, backups and on-call for a system sitting next to your billing data. The second is the licence — AGPLv3 is network copyleft, so modifying Lago and offering the modified version over a network obliges you to make that source available. Neither is a reason not to run it. Both are reasons not to file it under $0 next to ChartMogul's free plan, which is a hosted product with a support contract behind it.

And a percentage never stops. This is the structural cost of the mobile shape. A ceiling-priced tool hands you a bill once and then holds it steady inside the band; a floor-priced tool takes a fixed cut of every additional dollar forever. Neither is worse — but the free tier is the part of that arrangement you notice, and the multiplier is the part you sign.

The costs specific to ProfitWell being free rather than free tiers in general — the three-to-six hour batch window, the single-source architecture, no warehouse export at any price, and sitting at the top of Paddle's funnel — we worked through separately in ChartMogul vs ProfitWell Metrics rather than repeating them here.

The Tools With No Free Tier at All

Worth listing explicitly, because several of them appear in "best free subscription analytics" roundups on the strength of a trial.

Putler is the interesting entry here for anyone who dislikes step changes: it meters on monthly revenue in steps from $20 up to $2,250, with all features on every tier and unlimited orders. There is no free plan, but there is also no feature gate — the thing you are choosing between is a $20 floor with a smooth ramp, or a $0 floor with a cliff and a feature ladder.

A Decision Rule

Under $1M ARR, billing through Stripe, and you want a dashboard: start with Grid's free Starter plan. It is free roughly eight times further up the revenue curve than ChartMogul's, and the integrations it withholds are ones you probably do not run yet.

You need benchmarks or you never want a bill: ProfitWell Metrics, accepting three-to-six-hour freshness and Paddle's ownership of the relationship.

You are within 20% of a free ceiling: ignore the free tier entirely and choose on billing-source coverage, freshness and team-seat limits, because the free window is worth a few hundred dollars and the switching cost is worth more.

You bill through the App Store or Google Play: compare the free floors, not the rates — $2,500 against $10,000 decides your first two years. Then compare the rates, because 0.4 percentage points decides everything after that.

You run your own infrastructure and want no ceiling: Lago self-hosted, with the AGPLv3 obligations and the ops burden understood in advance.

You need multiple billing systems merged: no free tier reaches this. ChartMogul's free plan and Starter allow one billing connection; Pro allows five and Enterprise up to fifteen. This is the requirement that ends the free conversation fastest, and it is the one worth checking first.

FAQ

Which subscription analytics tool is free forever?

ProfitWell Metrics, owned by Paddle, with no revenue ceiling. Paddle funds it by selling adjacent paid products such as Retain. The trade-offs are freshness — dashboards refresh every three to six hours — and the fact that your revenue data sits with a company that competes for your billing relationship. Superwall also makes its subscription infrastructure layer free at any scale, though that is mobile in-app purchase infrastructure rather than SaaS billing analytics.

What is ChartMogul's free tier limit?

$10,000 MRR, which is $120,000 ARR, covering metric calculation, data unification and customer segmentation. The next step is Starter from $59 a month, which adds CRM sync and Slack updates but caps the team at three members. Starter scales from $59 to $707 a month by ARR band up to $10M ARR; Pro runs $99 to $1,199, lifts the team cap and allows five billing-system connections.

Is there a free SaaS metrics tool above $10K MRR?

Yes — Grid, formerly SaaSGrid, is free on Starter for companies under $1M ARR, with around 70 metrics, custom shareable dashboards, unlimited viewers, and Stripe, QuickBooks, Xero and spreadsheet integrations. Salesforce, HubSpot, NetSuite and Sage Intacct sit on the custom-quoted Growth plan.

Does Baremetrics have a free plan?

No, only a trial. Launch covers $0 to $360,000 ARR at $49 a month on annual billing or $75 monthly; Growth covers $360,000 to $3.6M ARR at $189 a month annual; Scale starts at $749 a month annual above $3.6M ARR. Recover and Cancellation Insights are $129 a month each on top.

How much does mobile subscription analytics cost?

It is a percentage of tracked revenue above a free floor rather than a monthly fee, and the floors differ fourfold. RevenueCat is free to $2,500 monthly tracked revenue then 1%. Adapty is free to $5,000 a month then 1%. Qonversion is free to $10,000 monthly tracked revenue then 0.6% on Starter or 0.8% on Growth. Superwall's infrastructure is free at any scale and only paywall-attributed revenue meters, free below $10,000 a month.

Is a free tier worth choosing a vendor for?

Rarely, because the window is short relative to the switching cost. A company at $9,200 MRR growing 6% a month crosses ChartMogul's ceiling in month two and pays about $590 over the following year — within $2 of what Baremetrics charges for a full year on a plan that was never free. Choose on billing-source coverage, data freshness, seat limits and who ends up holding your revenue data.

All prices read from each vendor's own published pricing page and recorded in our verified directory listings, checked 20 August 2026. Growth rates and the resulting month-by-month totals are stated assumptions used to illustrate the arithmetic, not vendor data. Percentage-of-revenue pricing at RevenueCat and Adapty is measured on tracked revenue before the app store's cut. Prices change; check the vendor page before budgeting.