Stripe

Billing signals: seats, plan changes, failed payments, and MRR.

Category: Billing · Auth: Secret API key (or Connect OAuth)

Stripe is the richest commercial signal for most SaaS accounts. Money is the clearest statement of intent a customer makes — who's expanding, who's downgrading, and who's about to lapse on payment shows up in Stripe before it shows up anywhere else. Wiring it in means your churn score reacts to a failed renewal or a seat reduction the moment it happens, not at the next QBR.

What it pulls

Seat & license counts — current seats used vs purchased, from subscription quantities.
Plan upgrades & downgrades — tier changes that signal rising or falling commitment.
Failed payments & dunning — the most direct pre-churn signal there is.
MRR / ARR per account — the revenue at stake, used to weigh how much a churn would cost.

Signals it feeds

Stripe lights up the commercial and growth side of the score:

Seats used vs purchased (seat_purchased, seat_used) — utilization is a leading downgrade signal.
Plan upgrades and Seat expansion (plan_upgraded, seat_expanded) — positive growth flags.
Contract value (MRR tier) — sets the revenue-at-risk band that prioritizes who to save first.

Setup

In ChurnWarn, open Settings → Integrations → Stripe and choose Connect.
In your Stripe dashboard → API keys, create a restricted key with read access to Customers, Subscriptions, and Invoices.
Paste the key into ChurnWarn and save.
Map Stripe customers to your accounts by email or the Stripe customer id.
Press Sync now to backfill recent subscriptions and confirm signals land on the right accounts.

Use a restricted key

ChurnWarn only needs read access. Create a restricted key scoped to Customers, Subscriptions, and Invoices rather than your live secret key — if it ever leaks, the blast radius is read-only billing data.

Staying in sync

After the initial backfill, Stripe webhooks keep billing signals current in near-real-time — a failed payment or a plan change updates the account within seconds. Use Sync now whenever you want to force a fresh pull, and watch the integration's last sync and last error indicators to catch an expired or under-scoped key.

Reference: Stripe API keys documentation.