Monthly Recurring Revenue. It sounds like it should be self-explanatory, and mostly it is — but the details of how it's calculated trip up a lot of first-time founders, especially once discounts, annual plans, and multiple providers enter the picture.

The basic definition

MRR is the total predictable revenue you can expect every month from active subscriptions, normalized to a monthly figure. A $1,200/year subscription counts as $100 of MRR, not $1,200 — that normalization is the entire point of the metric, since it lets you compare monthly and annual plans on equal footing.

Where people get it wrong

One-time payments don't count. A $500 lifetime deal or a one-off consulting invoice isn't recurring, so it shouldn't be in your MRR number even if it hits your bank account this month. Mixing the two inflates a number that's supposed to represent predictable, repeatable revenue.

Gross vs. net matters too. Some founders track MRR before payment processor fees, others after. Neither is wrong, but you need to be consistent, and you need to know which one you're looking at when you compare month over month.

Why it gets harder with multiple providers

If half your subscribers pay through Stripe and half through a Merchant of Record like Paddle, your MRR is the sum of both — but each platform reports its own MRR-adjacent number differently, and neither one natively includes the other's data. Adding them by hand every month works until someone forgets, or a plan change on one platform doesn't get reflected in the manual total.

Simeon pulls net revenue from every connected provider and normalizes it, so your MRR reflects your whole business rather than whichever platform happens to have a built-in dashboard.