OPEN METRICS · UPDATED MONTHLY

The numbers that make LADLE a business.

MRR, subscribers, meals funded, API-cost as a share of revenue, churn — with commentary written the week the numbers land. Because the whole point of LADLE is that “$8 becomes ten meals” is verifiable, and verifiability starts with us publishing the numbers we’d rather not.

MEALS FUNDED · LIFETIME

0123456789,012345678901234567890123456789,012345678901234567890123456789

$1,027,468 SENT TO WFP · RECONCILES TO /IMPACT/REPORTS

THE METRICS

SUBSCRIBERS+312 MoM

16,054activeAs of last month-end batch. Not deduplicated across household gift + personal.

MRR+$6,240 MoM

$321,080USD monthly recurringRounded to the nearest $10. Excludes annual pre-pay amortized MRR (small).

MEALS FUNDED · LIFETIME+120,515 MoM

1,284,336since launchAggregate transferred to WFP via ShareTheMeal. Reconciles to /impact/reports.

MEALS FUNDED · MOST RECENT MONTH+9,290 MoM

120,515July 2026Reference 4471-A

GROSS CHURN · MONTHLY-0.2 pts MoM

2.3%of subscribersIncludes voluntary + involuntary. Involuntary is ~30% of the number.

API COST · SHARE OF REVENUE-1 pt MoM

34%current monthInference cost as % of subscription revenue. Trending down as Anthropic pricing drops.

THE WHOLE POINT

Verifiable, or nothing.

MONTHLY COMMENTARY

The story behind the numbers, in the founder’s voice.

July 2026

FOUNDER · 2026-08-01

MRR growth eased month-over-month — net new subscribers held (+312) but our expansion revenue softened as fewer Base users upgraded to Max. This is a good problem for the meal math: Base subscribers fund meals at the same $8 rate, so total meals funded still grew ~8% MoM. On the cost side, the API-cost-to-revenue ratio dropped a point after Anthropic's pricing update mid-month. Churn stayed comfortably below our internal 3% ceiling; the biggest driver of cancellations continues to be users who tried LADLE, liked it, but were already committed to ChatGPT for enterprise reasons. The refund policy (7 days, no questions) means those cancellations complete cleanly — 84% of cancels this month were within-7-days and full-refunded.

June 2026

FOUNDER · 2026-07-01

First month above $300K MRR. Two things happened. First, we shipped the Impact reporting page and the sample statement embed, which resulted in a spike of team-plan waitlist requests (48 vs March's 12) — several of those closed within the same month. Second, we published /manifesto and the surface-level marketing traffic-to-signup conversion moved up ~15 basis points; this is a much smaller effect than the team-plan close-rate improvement but it's the compounding one to watch. Meals funded lifetime crossed 1.1M; we're on track for 1.5M by year-end without needing to accelerate subscriber acquisition.

WHY WE PUBLISH THESE

The whole company is downstream of one operating decision.

LADLE’s pitch — $8 of every $20 becomes ten meals — only works if it’s verifiable. Verifiability starts with the monthly WFP receipt at /impact/reports (proves the transfer happened). It continues here (proves the company is around to keep making the transfer). If we hid our unit economics behind a NDA, the whole “receipts, not marketing” frame would fall apart.

The specific model: we publish MRR, subscriber count, meals funded, gross churn, and API cost as a share of revenue. We do not publish per-customer revenue, gross margin excluding meals, or salary/personal financials — those are ours to share only when asked, not to volunteer.

The genre reference is Buffer’s open salaries and open revenue in the 2010s. The reason to imitate it here specifically: the meal donation is a promise that compounds only if the company keeps existing. Publishing the numbers makes the promise harder to break silently.

CAVEATS

What we round, what we won’t share, why.

MRR is rounded to the nearest $10. Sharper precision would imply real-time accuracy we can’t maintain on a monthly cadence.
Subscriber count is active-only. Excludes paused accounts, gift accounts not yet redeemed, and the small number of accounts in the 7-day refund window.
Meals lifetime is authoritative. Reconciles exactly to the sum of published monthly receipts at /impact/reports.
Churn number excludes 7-day refund cancellations. Those aren’t churn — they’re try-and-decide-not-to-continue, and lumping them with real churn would flatter the number.
API-cost share is current-month, not blended. Blended would smooth out Anthropic’s pricing changes; current-month shows the actual pressure on unit economics.
We do not publish: per-customer revenue, salary details, founder compensation, individual investor names, exact runway. Those exist and are known to relevant parties; they’re not for the open page.
Update cadence. Metrics recalculate on the 1st of every month using the previous month’s closing data. Commentary lands within one business week.

If you want a metric added, ask.

Email hello@ladle.chat with the metric you want to see and we'll say yes or explain why not.

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$20/MO · CANCEL ANYTIME · $0.80/MEAL · RECEIPTS MONTHLY

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