Baremetrics and ChartMogul are both built to track YOUR Stripe account. If your real question is 'how does my MRR compare to other indie SaaS,' here's the honest breakdown, plus real benchmark data from 3,787 tracked startups.
If you searched for a Baremetrics alternative free or a ChartMogul alternative, you’re probably trying to solve one of two very different problems that happen to share a search box. Problem one: “I need to track MRR, churn, and dunning for my own Stripe account.” Problem two: “I have no idea if my $200 MRR indie SaaS is normal, and I want to see real numbers from other founders.” Baremetrics and ChartMogul are genuinely excellent at problem one. Neither touches problem two, because both only ever show you your own connected data. TrustMRR, BigIdeasDB’s revenue-intelligence tool, was built for problem two: a live dataset of 8,699 tracked startups, with a median MRR of $145 across the 3,787 that report real revenue. This is an honest look at what Baremetrics and ChartMogul do well, where the gap actually is, and the real benchmark data behind it.
Every “Baremetrics alternative” and “ChartMogul alternative” roundup we looked at, including comparisons from Baremetrics itself, G2, Peaka, and GrowthOptix, frames the decision the same way: which Stripe-connected analytics tool should I plug my payment account into? That’s a reasonable question if you already have paying customers on Stripe and want prettier charts, dunning emails, or cancellation insights. But a large chunk of the people typing “baremetrics alternative free” into Google aren’t there yet. They’re solo founders at $0-$500 MRR who don’t need another dashboard for data they can already see in Stripe’s own reports; they want context. Is $500 MRR after six months good, bad, or completely average? None of the existing comparison content answers that, because none of the tools it covers are built to.
To be fair to both, they earn their spot at the top of every roundup. ChartMogul gives you the complete analytics product, cohort retention, segmentation by channel and plan, revenue forecasting, and a built-in CRM, for free up to around $10K MRR ($120K ARR). That’s not a stripped-down trial; per ChartMogul’s own comparison page and independent roundups, it’s the full product. Past that ceiling, pricing runs roughly $59-69/month at the Starter tier and scales with revenue from there.
Baremetrics leans the other direction: it wants you to act on your metrics, not just look at them. Its own comparison page pitches “ChartMogul shows you the numbers. Baremetrics helps you act on them,” backed by Recover (automated dunning for failed payments, an add-on from $129/month), Cancellation Insights (a churn-reason widget with automated win-back offers), and Forecast+ (P&L-based runway and burn-rate modeling pulled from QuickBooks or Xero). Pricing starts around $49-75/month depending on the plan. If your business is already leaking revenue to failed cards or you want CFO-style forecasting without hiring a CFO, that add-on stack is worth the price. See our broader rundown of this category, including ProfitWell and CashFish, in Best MRR & Burn Rate Tracking Tools for 2026.
Here’s the structural limit that no amount of feature-stacking fixes. Baremetrics and ChartMogul are, by design, single-tenant tools: they ingest your Stripe (or Braintree, Chargebee, Recurly) account and turn your transactions into your charts. Even ChartMogul’s benchmarking claims are about your own account’s trends over time, not where you sit next to other companies. ProfitWell Metrics is the one tool in the category that ships real cross-company benchmarking for free, comparing your churn and growth to “30,000+ subscription companies,” but that’s a ProfitWell feature, not something Baremetrics or ChartMogul offer.
So if you’re pre-revenue or under a few hundred dollars in MRR, connecting Stripe to a $49-75/month dashboard to look at only your own (mostly empty) numbers doesn’t answer the question that’s actually keeping you up: “how do I compare to other people building the same kind of thing?” Answering that requires data from other companies, aggregated, which is a different dataset entirely from your own Stripe export. That’s the gap the Revenue Intelligence tool fills. For the difference between the revenue concepts these tools report, see MRR vs ARR vs TTM Revenue, Explained.
TrustMRR tracks 8,699 startups, of which 3,787 show measurable monthly recurring revenue. Here’s the actual distribution, pulled live from that dataset, not a marketing estimate:
| Percentile | MRR |
|---|---|
| 25th (bottom quarter) | $29 |
| 50th (median) | $145 |
| 75th | $894 |
| 90th | $5,107 |
| 95th | $13,205 |
| Highest tracked | $3.57M |
The average across those same startups is $4,298, more than 29× the median. That gap is the tell: a small number of large outliers pull the average way up, while the typical tracked startup is nowhere close to it. If you’ve ever felt behind because a “SaaS founders average $4K MRR” stat made your $150 look small, the median is the number that actually describes your peer group.
| MRR range | Share of revenue-reporting startups |
|---|---|
| Under $100 | 44.0% |
| $100 – $1,000 | 32.3% |
| $1,000 – $10,000 | 17.6% |
| $10,000 – $50,000 | 4.9% |
| Over $50,000 | 1.2% |
Read together: 44% of tracked startups with any revenue at all are still under $100 MRR, and clearing $1,000 MRR already puts you ahead of roughly three-quarters of them. Only about 1 in 17 crosses $10,000 MRR, which lines up with the 23.6% and 6.1% figures in our deep dive, the State of Indie SaaS Revenue 2026 report. For how growth (not just level) compares across the same dataset, see How Fast Do SaaS Startups Actually Grow? and for the full percentile and category breakdown, read the 2026 SaaS Revenue Benchmark Report.
MRR also varies a lot by what you’re building. Here’s average vs. median MRR across the largest categories tracked in TrustMRR, each with at least 50 revenue-reporting startups:
| Category | Startups | Avg. MRR | Median MRR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Artificial Intelligence | 941 | $2,930 | $203 |
| SaaS | 353 | $3,701 | $156 |
| Mobile Apps | 305 | $2,039 | $143 |
| Productivity | 223 | $625 | $46 |
| Marketing | 213 | $4,048 | $276 |
| Health & Fitness | 190 | $1,975 | $101 |
| Education | 175 | $4,157 | $208 |
| Content Creation | 172 | $22,515 | $123 |
| Developer Tools | 165 | $1,336 | $68 |
Content Creation is the most extreme illustration of average-vs-median skew in the whole dataset: a $22,515 average next to a $123 median means a handful of breakout creators are carrying the category, and the typical Content Creation startup earns far less than the headline number suggests. Marketing and Education post the highest typical (median) revenue among these categories, while Productivity is the most crowded-but-modest, a lot of tools, most earning under $50/month.
| Capability | Baremetrics | ChartMogul | TrustMRR |
|---|---|---|---|
| Job it’s built for | Track & act on YOUR Stripe MRR | Track YOUR Stripe MRR, free early on | Benchmark YOUR MRR against other startups |
| Requires connecting your own Stripe account | Yes | Yes | No |
| Dunning / failed-payment recovery | Yes (Recover add-on, from $129/mo) | No native dunning | No |
| Cancellation insights & win-back | Yes | No | No |
| Financial forecasting (P&L, runway, burn) | Yes (Forecast+, included in every plan) | ARR scenario modeling only | No |
| Cross-company MRR benchmarks | No | No (ProfitWell offers this, not ChartMogul) | Yes (3,787 tracked startups) |
| Acquisition / “for sale” deal data | No | No | Yes (asking price, revenue multiple) |
| AI chat over aggregate market data | No | No | Yes (7 research tools) |
| Entry pricing | ~$49-75/month | Free to ~$120K ARR, then $59+/month | Free to browse; Pro for AI chat & deal flow |
Baremetrics and ChartMogul both require you to connect a Stripe (or similar) account, and neither one can tell you how your numbers compare to anyone else’s. TrustMRR does the opposite: no Stripe connection, no dunning or forecasting for your own business, but real percentile and category benchmarks from 3,787 tracked startups so you can answer “is this normal?” instead of just “what is this?”
These aren’t mutually exclusive. Plenty of founders run Baremetrics or ChartMogul against their own Stripe account for day-to-day tracking and check TrustMRR separately for outside context, the same way you’d check a salary survey even though you already know your own paycheck. Get started with the free dashboard in Getting Started with TrustMRR, or brush up on the underlying metric definitions in How to Calculate MRR.
Stop guessing whether your MRR is normal. See real benchmarks from 8,699 tracked startups on TrustMRR.
If you need a free tool that connects to your own Stripe account, ChartMogul’s core analytics product is free up to roughly $10K MRR ($120K ARR) and includes cohort analysis, segmentation, and a built-in CRM. If what you actually want is a free way to see how your MRR compares to other indie SaaS companies, not just your own Stripe data, TrustMRR’s revenue-intelligence dashboard is free to browse and pulls from 8,699 tracked startups.
ProfitWell Metrics is the closest fully-free, no-revenue-cap alternative for Stripe-connected analytics, and it adds benchmarking against 30,000+ companies that ChartMogul itself doesn’t offer. For cross-company MRR benchmarking specifically, TrustMRR is free to browse and shows real percentile data from 3,787 revenue-reporting startups.
Baremetrics and ChartMogul connect to your own Stripe (or other payment) account and turn your transactions into MRR, churn, and cohort charts, plus, for Baremetrics, dunning and cancellation tools for your own business. TrustMRR does not connect to your Stripe account at all. It’s a market-intelligence database of 8,699 tracked third-party SaaS startups with real MRR, growth, and customer counts, built so you can benchmark your own numbers against real founders instead of only looking at your own dashboard.
Across 3,787 revenue-reporting startups in TrustMRR, the median MRR is $145 and the average is skewed much higher ($4,298) by a small number of large outliers. Clearing $894 MRR puts you in the top 25% of tracked startups; clearing $5,107 puts you in the top 10%; and only 1.2% of tracked startups earn more than $50,000 MRR.
No. TrustMRR has no Stripe OAuth or payment-account connection for your own business, and it does not offer dunning, cancellation flows, or invoice-level billing tools. It’s a benchmarking and market-research tool built on aggregated revenue data from thousands of other startups, not a personal billing dashboard.