AI-Powered SaaS Metrics & Churn Intelligence Tool

The Idea

Build a lightweight SaaS metrics + AI intelligence layer that connects to Stripe and tells founders not just what their metrics are — but why they are changing and what to do about it.

Tools like ChartMogul and Baremetrics start at $100–$300/month and are designed for growth-stage companies with finance teams. The indie hacker building their first SaaS at $800 MRR doesn't need enterprise dashboards — they need someone to tell them "your churn is spiking and here's why."

You are building that product. The AI layer is the entire moat. The dashboard is just the wrapper.

The Problem You Solve

Every early-stage SaaS founder has the same blind spots:

They see churn happen but have no idea which customers are at risk before they cancel
They can calculate MRR in a spreadsheet but spend hours trying to understand why it changed
They get alerts when bad things happen — but by then it's already too late
They don't know which acquisition channel produces customers who actually stay
They can't afford ChartMogul or the time to set up Metabase + dbt + a data warehouse

The result: founders fly blind, react instead of prevent, and lose customers they could have saved.

Core Features (MVP)

Feature	What It Does
Stripe Connect	One-click OAuth to Stripe. Pulls all subscription, invoice, and customer data in minutes.
Automated Metrics Dashboard	Auto-calculates MRR, ARR, churn rate, LTV, CAC, net revenue retention, and cohort retention. No config. Just connect and it works.
AI Narrative Summary	Every Monday, the AI writes a plain-English summary: "Your MRR grew 8% this week. The growth came from 4 new Team plan customers, but you also lost 2 customers who both signed up in January and never upgraded from free trial."
Churn Prediction	AI flags at-risk customers 2–4 weeks before likely cancellation based on usage drop patterns, billing age, plan type, and cohort comparisons.
Root Cause Analysis	When a metric changes, you can click "Why did this change?" and the AI analyzes the underlying data and gives you a prioritized hypothesis.
Weekly Email Digest	Short AI-written email every Monday with your key numbers, biggest changes, and one recommended action.

Pricing

Tier	Who It's For	Price
Solo	1 Stripe account, up to $10k MRR, weekly AI digest	$19/month
Founder	1 Stripe account, unlimited MRR, churn prediction, root cause analysis	$49/month
Studio	3 Stripe accounts (for founders running multiple products), all features	$99/month

Pricing is intentionally low to get under the "just try it" threshold for indie hackers. The goal at launch is adoption and word of mouth, not revenue optimization. Raise prices once you have 100 customers and testimonials.

Tech Stack (All in Your Wheelhouse)

Next.js + TypeScript — frontend and API routes
Stripe Connect API — OAuth to customer Stripe accounts, pull subscription/invoice data
Claude API (claude-sonnet-4-6) — the AI analysis engine for all narratives, root cause, and predictions
Supabase — auth, database (store pulled metrics, user accounts, weekly digest history)
Vercel — hosting with zero-config deployment, scales automatically
Stripe Billing — for your own subscriptions (you'll use Stripe to sell access to a Stripe analytics tool — the recursion is real)
Resend — transactional email for the weekly digest
shadcn/ui — clean dashboard UI without needing a designer

No new infrastructure to learn. No ML models to train. You are an integration engineer wiring well-understood APIs together with an AI reasoning layer on top.

How to Build the MVP (5 Weekend Sprint)

Weekend 1: Stripe Connect integration. OAuth flow, pull all subscriptions and invoices, store in Supabase, calculate MRR/churn/LTV. No UI — just prove the data pipeline works in a CLI script first.

Weekend 2: Next.js dashboard. Auth (Supabase), Stripe Connect button, metrics display page. Clean, readable numbers. No charts yet — text-based metrics are faster to build and easier to understand.

Weekend 3: AI narrative layer. Write the Claude prompts that take the raw metric data and produce the Monday summary, the root cause analysis, and the at-risk customer flags. Iterate heavily on prompt quality — this is your product.

Weekend 4: Weekly digest email with Resend. Stripe billing for your own subscriptions. Public landing page with a live demo using a fake (but realistic) Stripe dataset.

Weekend 5: Polish, onboarding flow, error handling for edge cases (no invoices yet, free plans only, etc.). Deploy. Prepare launch content.

How to Get Your First 50 Paying Customers

Indie Hackers. This is the highest-density community of exactly your buyer. Post in the forum: "I built an AI that reads your Stripe data and tells you why your churn is happening — here's what it found for my own product." Show a real screenshot. Indie Hackers traffic is slow but converts extremely well for this type of tool.
Build in public on X/Twitter. Post weekly updates as you build. "Weekend 3: got Claude to correctly identify that my biggest churn cohort are monthly customers who never invite a team member. Here's the prompt I used." Developers and founders follow this obsessively.
Product Hunt launch. Schedule for the first Tuesday after your MVP is live. Your IH and Twitter audience is your upvote base. Product Hunt drives awareness, not necessarily customers, but the badge builds trust.
Cold DM founders who complain about churn. Search X for "struggling with churn" or "losing customers" from SaaS founders. 5 genuine DMs a day offering free access for feedback will get you better data than any marketing campaign.
"Powered by [YourProduct]" in digest emails. If founders forward your weekly digest to their co-founders or investors (they will), that's free organic distribution. Add a subtle footer link.

Revenue Math

Scenario	Monthly Recurring Revenue
30 Solo + 15 Founder	$1,305/month
60 Solo + 40 Founder + 10 Studio	$4,130/month
100 Solo + 80 Founder + 20 Studio	$7,820/month

At 80 Founder plan customers, you have roughly $4,000 MRR. That number keeps growing every month as more indie hackers launch products and need metrics tooling. Churn on this product is naturally low — once a founder has their metrics in one place and trusts the weekly digest, they do not cancel.

Why This Is Different from the Other Ideas in This Folder

Not an agency. You are not trading time for money. You build it once.
Not a developer tool. The buyer is a SaaS founder or indie hacker, not an engineering team. Different distribution channels, different buying psychology, different messaging.
B2C/prosumer pricing. $19–$99/month is an impulse buy for someone making money from their SaaS. No sales calls, no procurement process.
High emotional value. Churn is stressful. Anything that reduces anxiety around the health of your business feels essential, not optional.
Stripe is universal truth. Every SaaS uses Stripe. A Stripe integration means zero onboarding friction — there is nothing to set up except OAuth.

Path to Quitting Your Day Job

Months 1–2: Build the Stripe data pipeline and AI narrative layer. Validate that the Claude output is genuinely insightful on real data. Use your own side projects or fake data to test. If the AI summary surprises you with something you didn't notice, the product is working.
Month 3: Soft launch on Indie Hackers and to personal network. Get 10 users on the free or discounted early-access tier. Collect feedback on what the AI got right and wrong.
Months 4–6: Iterate on prompt quality, churn prediction accuracy, and UI polish. Convert early users to paid. Aim for $500–$1,000 MRR. Launch on Product Hunt.
Months 6–9: Invest in SEO ("saas churn dashboard", "stripe analytics tool", "mrr calculator"). This traffic compounds slowly but is extremely high intent.
Months 9–12: $2,000–$4,000 MRR. Add the Studio tier to capture multi-product founders. Begin automating support with a Claude-powered FAQ bot on the site.
Month 12–18: $5,000–$10,000 MRR. Reduce hours at day job. At $8k MRR with ~70% margin, you are past most software engineers' after-tax monthly take-home.

Risks & Mitigations

Risk	Mitigation
Stripe API rate limits or ToS issues	Use Stripe Connect properly (users grant read-only access). Review ToS before launch. Rate limit is not a real concern at early scale.
"Baremetrics already does this"	Baremetrics starts at $108/month and has no meaningful AI layer. Your $19 entry point and AI narrative are the entire differentiation. Position explicitly: "the Baremetrics for indie hackers."
AI gives wrong root cause analysis	Frame it as "hypothesis, not diagnosis." Give confidence levels. Founders understand that AI isn't perfect — they still value a starting point over no analysis.
Low data quality for churn prediction at small MRR	Be transparent: prediction accuracy improves with 3+ months of data. New users get a "building baseline" state for the first 60 days.
Hard to reach customers who are struggling (they churn before you can save them)	Focus marketing on prevention framing: "Know who's about to cancel before they do." That resonates most before churn hits.

Why This Works for You Specifically

You are (or will be) your own customer. The moment you have a paying SaaS product, you will want this tool. That means you will build it with the right instincts.
The hardest part is the AI prompt engineering, not the infrastructure. Writing prompts that produce genuinely useful churn analysis is a skill that compounds. Once you crack it, it is very hard for a non-technical competitor to replicate.
Indie hacker community is your people. You are a developer who wants to quit your day job. Your buyers are developers who are already one step further down that path. You speak the same language.
You can build the entire thing solo. Stripe API, Claude API, Supabase, Vercel — you already know or can learn all of this in days. There is no dependency on a designer, data scientist, or business partner.
Compounding SEO moat. Metric-related keywords ("how to calculate saas churn", "what is net revenue retention") have high search volume and weak SEO competition from indie tool sites. A few good blog posts written by or with Claude can drive organic traffic for years.

First Action (Do This Today)

Open your Stripe dashboard (or a test account). Export the last 6 months of subscription and invoice data as CSV. Paste it into Claude with this prompt:

"You are a SaaS metrics analyst. Based on this Stripe data, calculate my MRR, monthly churn rate, and average customer lifetime. Then tell me which customer segments have the highest churn and hypothesize why. Be specific and use the data."

If the output gives you insight you didn't have before — the product is real. That test takes 20 minutes and costs under $0.50 in API credits.