Clientdesk and ChartMogul / Baremetrics solve the same problem from opposite directions: one is source-available software you can own outright for $39, the other is a subscription at $50-100+/mo run entirely on someone else's servers.
Head to head
| Clientdesk | ChartMogul / Baremetrics | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $39 once | $50-100+/mo |
| MRR / ARR / churn / LTV | Yes | Yes |
| Customer-facing portal | Yes | No / add-on |
| Usage metering shown to customers | Yes | No |
| Branded receipt emails | Yes | No |
| Data location | Your SQLite file | Their cloud |
| Self-hosted | Yes | No |
What Clientdesk does well
- Revenue dashboard — MRR with trials excluded and yearly plans normalized, plus ARR, 30-day churn, LTV, ARPU and cash collected, with daily snapshots building trend history.
- Stripe webhook ingestion — Point /webhooks/stripe at your account and customers, subscriptions and invoices cache locally, with optional signature verification and no Stripe SDK or API polling.
- Customer portal — Per-customer tokenized portal links show plan, status, invoice history and usage bars, with strict isolation so a token only ever sees its own data.
- Usage metering — Your backend POSTs /api/usage with an ingest key and customers see how much of their allowance they have used next to their bill.
What ChartMogul / Baremetrics still does better
There's a real reason ChartMogul / Baremetrics costs what it does: a bigger team, broader integrations and dedicated support behind it. If that ecosystem is genuinely what you need, it's worth paying for.
Which one should you pick
If your workflow depends on ChartMogul / Baremetrics's specific integrations or you'd rather not run anything yourself, stay put — that's a legitimate call. If you're comfortable owning the tool and want to stop paying $50-100+/mo for a job your own hardware can do, Clientdesk pays for itself and then some: one month of ChartMogul more than covers Clientdesk, which then reads your Stripe data for free forever.
Try Clientdesk — $39, once
MRR, ARR, churn and LTV plus branded customer portals, computed from your Stripe webhooks.