The numbers that make LADLE a business.

MRR, subscribers, meals reserved, 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 reserves ten meals in the meal fund” is verifiable, and verifiability starts with us publishing the numbers we’d rather not.

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

The whole company is downstream of one operating decision.

LADLE’s pitch — $8 of every $20 reserves ten meals in the meal fund — only works if it’s verifiable. Verifiability starts with the monthly fund report at /impact/reports (proves the earmark landed). It continues here (proves the company is around to keep making the earmark, and to eventually clear the $50k/year threshold that unlocks the formal partnership with the hunger-relief charity we select). If we hid our unit economics behind an NDA, the whole “reports, not marketing” frame would fall apart.

The specific model: we publish MRR, subscriber count, meals reserved, gross churn, and API cost as a share of revenue. We do not publish per-customer revenue, gross margin excluding the meal-fund line, or salary/personal financials — those are ours to share only when asked, not to volunteer.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-fund earmark is a promise that compounds only if the company keeps existing (and clears the threshold that turns earmarks into real partner donations). Publishing the numbers makes the promise harder to break silently.

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-reserved lifetime is authoritative. Reconciles exactly to the sum of published monthly fund reports 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• We do not publish: per-customer revenue, salary details, founder compensation, individual investor names, exact runway.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.