Analytics in a SaaS product is not optional. Without data, you're making product decisions based on guesses. With data, you make decisions based on what your users actually do. Here's what to track and how to build it.

The 8 SaaS Metrics That Actually Matter

  1. MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) — total subscription revenue per month
  2. ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue) — MRR × 12
  3. Churn Rate — percentage of customers who cancel each month
  4. NRR (Net Revenue Retention) — revenue retained from existing customers including expansions
  5. Activation Rate — percentage of signups who complete the key onboarding action
  6. DAU/MAU Ratio — how often users come back (stickiness)
  7. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) — total marketing spend / new customers acquired
  8. LTV (Lifetime Value) — average revenue per customer over their lifetime

Product Analytics: What Users Do

For tracking user behavior (clicks, feature usage, flows), I use PostHog. It's open-source, privacy-friendly, and can be self-hosted on your Replit deployment. Key events to track: signup, first core action, payment, feature X used, cancellation started.

Business Analytics: Revenue and Subscriptions

Stripe provides most of your revenue analytics automatically — MRR, ARR, new MRR, churned MRR, and expansion MRR. Export this data to your own database daily for custom dashboards.

Build vs Buy for Analytics

For early-stage SaaS, use: PostHog (product), Stripe Dashboard (revenue), and Google Search Console (SEO). Don't build a custom analytics dashboard until you know exactly what you need to see — that's a significant engineering investment that rarely pays off early.

Build a Data-Driven SaaS From Day One

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Building Your First Analytics Dashboard

Start with a single dashboard that shows all eight metrics at a glance. Stripe provides the revenue numbers. PostHog captures the product events. Your database holds everything else. Display this dashboard on a TV screen in your workspace if you have one — or as a browser tab you check every morning. The habit of reviewing metrics daily builds an intuition for your business that no amount of strategic planning can replace. Numbers tell the truth when customers are being polite.