What counts as an active subscription?

Updated 2026-08-04

"Active subscriptions only" sounds simple until you look at the actual states a subscription can be in. Stripe alone has half a dozen.

The states and what to do with them

Why trials are excluded

A trial is a hope, not revenue. If you count trials, your MRR includes money that hasn't arrived and may not — and your figure will overstate by roughly your trial-to-paid failure rate, which for most products is the majority.

The useful thing to track alongside MRR is trial conversion rate as its own metric. Blending it in hides both.

Why past-due is the interesting one

A past-due subscription is a customer who wants your product and whose card failed — an expired card, a bank decline, a spending limit. This is involuntary churn, and a meaningful share of it is recoverable.

The convention is to exclude past-due from MRR, because the money genuinely hasn't arrived. But track it separately as "at risk" rather than writing it off. For many businesses this is the single largest recoverable revenue pool, and it's why dunning tools exist.

More in failed payments and involuntary churn.

The cancelled-but-not-expired case

A customer cancels on the 3rd; their term runs to the 28th. They've paid. They still have access.

Most conventions keep them in MRR until the term ends, then remove them. This gives you accurate current MRR, and the pending loss shows up in your churn forecast rather than as an immediate drop.

The alternative — removing them at cancellation — makes MRR more pessimistic and arguably more actionable. Either is defensible; just be consistent, because switching mid-stream creates a phantom step change.

What FRGMNT does

Counts active subscriptions. Trialling, past-due and cancelled subscriptions are excluded from True MRR, across Stripe and Lemon Squeezy.

That's the conservative reading — the figure shown is what's genuinely being paid right now, which is the number worth trusting.