Stripe

If your product sells subscriptions through Stripe, Startica can track revenue next to traffic and community numbers. It uses a restricted key you create with read-only permissions. Startica polls Stripe once a day; it doesn’t use webhooks, because Stripe can’t reach an app running on your own computer.

The key is per product. Each product can use a different Stripe account.

What the key needs

Startica makes one kind of request: it lists all subscriptions (every status) with their prices expanded. It never creates, changes or deletes anything.

Resource	Permission	Why
Subscriptions	Read	Listing subscriptions. Required.
Prices	Read	Reading each subscription item’s price and billing interval
Customers	Read	Recommended by the in-app instructions
Invoices	Read	Recommended by the in-app instructions
Everything else	None	Not used

The in-app steps ask for Read on Customers, Subscriptions, Prices and Invoices. The current version only calls the subscriptions list, so Subscriptions and Prices are the minimum. Granting all four read permissions keeps the key working if a later version reads customers or invoices. All of these are read-only either way.

Create the restricted key

1. In Startica, open Settings → Products → Connections for … with the right product active. On the Stripe row, click Connect, then the Create restricted key link in the dialog. This opens dashboard.stripe.com/apikeys/create in your browser. Alternatively, go to the Stripe Dashboard Developers → API keys and click Create restricted key.
2. Make sure you’re in the right Stripe account, and in live mode (or a sandbox, for testing).
3. If Stripe asks how you’ll use the key, choose to create it yourself with custom permissions, starting from no permissions.
4. Key name: Startica.
5. Set Read for Subscriptions and Prices, and for Customers and Invoices if you follow the in-app recommendation. Leave everything else at None.
6. Click Create key, and complete the verification Stripe sends you.
7. Copy the key. It starts with rk_live_ (or rk_test_ in a sandbox). Stripe shows it only once.

Enter it in Startica

1. On the Stripe row, click Connect. If a key is already saved, the button reads Replace key.
2. Paste the key into Restricted key and click Save and test.

Startica stores the key encrypted (see how credentials are stored) and syncs right away. The row shows Connected and Last synced, or Error with Stripe’s message. A key that doesn’t start with rk_ or sk_ plus live_ or test_ is rejected with “That doesn’t look like a Stripe key”.

What Startica computes

Metric	Meaning	History
active_subscriptions	Subscriptions with status active, trialing or past_due	One value per sync day. History builds up from the day you connect.
mrr	Monthly recurring revenue of those subscriptions, in your currency’s main unit (dollars, not cents)	One value per sync day, same as above
new_subscriptions	Subscriptions created on each day	Last 30 days, recomputed each sync
cancellations	Subscriptions whose canceled_at falls on each day	Last 30 days, recomputed each sync

How MRR is calculated for each subscription item: unit price × quantity, converted to a monthly amount (a yearly price is divided by 12, a weekly one multiplied by 52/12, a daily one by 365/12, taking the interval count into account), then summed.

Limits of that calculation:

• Discounts, coupons and taxes aren’t applied.
• Prices without a fixed unit amount, such as tiered or some usage-based prices, are skipped.
• Amounts in different currencies are added together without conversion. If you bill in several currencies, treat mrr as approximate.
• Plan mix (revenue per plan) isn’t computed in the current version.

Days are calendar days in UTC.

When it syncs

• Every day at 08:15 local time, while Startica is open.
• Right after you save a key (Save and test).
• When you click Sync now under the connections.

Each sync pages through your full subscription list, so a large Stripe account takes a little longer. No webhooks are involved, and nothing in Stripe needs to point at your computer.

Rotate or remove the key

• To rotate: create a new restricted key, paste it with Replace key, then delete or expire the old key on the Stripe Dashboard’s API keys page (the ⋯ menu next to the key).
• To remove: click the trash icon on the Stripe row. This deletes the stored key from Startica. Delete the key in Stripe as well.

Stored metric values stay in your local database after you remove the key.