Catalog¶
The content index for the wiki. Every page, one line each. Start here when answering a question, then drill into the pages that look relevant.
New to this? Read how it works first. For the chronological view of what changed and when, see the log.
Entities¶
Companies, products, and systems. One page each.
This project¶
| Page | Summary |
|---|---|
| Tidemill | Open-source subscription analytics engine offering transparent, auditable metric computation for any billing system. |
Analytics tools (competitors)¶
| Page | Summary |
|---|---|
| ChartMogul | Depth leader in segmentation and cohort analysis; Tidemill's closest functional competitor. |
| Baremetrics | Analytics plus an action layer — revenue recovery, forecasting, cancellation insight. |
| ProfitWell | Free metrics owned by Paddle; hardest competitor to undercut on price. |
| SaaSGrid | Finance-oriented revenue intelligence with 150+ metrics, aimed at CFOs. |
Billing engines (revenue sources)¶
| Page | Summary |
|---|---|
| Stripe Billing | Dominant managed billing platform; Tidemill's reference connector. Implemented. |
| Chargebee | Second implemented webhook source; the reason the canonical vocabulary exists. Implemented. |
| Lago | Open-source event-based billing for usage models; the beachhead market. Planned (P1). |
| Kill Bill | Veteran fully open-source, plugin-driven billing platform. Planned (P1). |
Accounting (expense sources)¶
| Page | Summary |
|---|---|
| QuickBooks Online | First expense-side integration; makes cost analysis possible alongside revenue. Implemented. |
Concepts¶
Domain ideas that recur across sources. Each page explains the idea, why it matters, how Tidemill computes it, and where the definitions are contested.
| Page | Summary |
|---|---|
| MRR | Normalized monthly revenue from active subscriptions; the base every other metric derives from. |
| Churn | Customers or revenue lost in a period, and the choices that make the number contestable. |
| Net Revenue Retention | Whether the existing customer base grows revenue on its own — NRR and its gross counterpart GRR. |
| Cohort Retention | What fraction of customers who started together are still active N months later. |
| LTV | Expected total revenue from a customer before churn; the most assumption-laden metric in the category. |
| Usage-Based Pricing | Charging for consumption — the dominant emerging pattern and the biggest source of analytics complexity. |
| Trial Conversion | Share of trials that become paying customers, and why historical values legitimately move. |
| Metric Transparency | The thesis that metrics should be auditable — the idea Tidemill's positioning rests on. |
Synthesis¶
Longer-form analysis that argues a position by linking out to entity and concept pages. These live in the Research section.
| Page | Summary |
|---|---|
| Market Overview | Subscription economy sizing, model types, and the metrics every subscription business tracks. |
| Business Models | Subscription model types and where each fits. |
| Pricing & Billing | Pricing models, billing mechanics, and optimization levers. |
| Billing Engines | Stripe Billing vs. Lago vs. Kill Bill as upstream data sources. |
| Analytics Tools | ChartMogul, Baremetrics, ProfitWell, and SaaSGrid compared. |
| Competitive Matrix | Side-by-side feature comparison and gap analysis. |
| Product Positioning | Where Tidemill fits and why it should exist. |
Reference¶
Hand-authored specifications. In scope for wiki maintenance and lint passes, but they describe what Tidemill does rather than what the wiki has learned — the agent keeps them consistent and cross-referenced, it does not rewrite them from sources.
| Page | Summary |
|---|---|
| Definitions | Canonical metric formulas, conventions, and documented divergences from ChartMogul. |
| Architecture — Overview | System design, dual integration modes, MVP scope. |
| Architecture — Events | Internal event schema and Kafka topics. |
| Architecture — Database | PostgreSQL schema and deployment topologies. |
| Architecture — Connectors | Webhook, database, and expense connector patterns. |
| Architecture — Canonical Vocabulary | Provider-agnostic enums every connector maps onto. |
| Architecture — Cubes | Query algebra: cubes and composable query fragments. |
| Architecture — Metrics | Metric base class and built-in metric implementations. |
| Architecture — Segments | Customer attribute EAV, segment DSL, compare mode. |
| Architecture — Expenses | Platform-neutral expense model and canonical enums. |
| Architecture — API | FastAPI endpoints and CLI interface. |
| Architecture — Reports | Pre-built charts and summaries for every metric. |
| Development | Local development environment setup. |
| Testing | Test data generation and seed scripts. |
| Deployment | Docker Compose and Terraform infrastructure. |
Sources¶
Raw source material lives in docs/wiki/sources/. It is tracked in git so the agent can
re-read it, but excluded from the published site — see
how it works. Conventions and the current capture backlog are in
docs/wiki/sources/README.md.