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For founders
The phrase is on badges all over the internet now. It means something quite specific and rather narrower than it sounds, and knowing which part is doing the work tells you what a badge is actually worth.
It claims the figure was read from the company’s own Stripe account rather than entered by hand. That is all — and it is enough to matter, because the alternative is a number typed by the person it flatters.
What it does not claim: that Stripe checked anything, that Stripe endorses the company, or that the business is well run. Stripe supplies subscription data through its API and has no view on what anyone does with it.
You create a restricted key in your Stripe dashboard with read access to Subscriptions and Customers, and nothing else. It starts with rk_. The product reads your subscriptions with it and computes recurring revenue from them.
A restricted key cannot move money, issue refunds, or change anything about your account, and you can revoke it from your own dashboard whenever you like. If a product asks for a secret key — one starting with sk_ — refuse. Nothing that measures revenue needs the ability to charge your customers.
MRR has no universal definition. Annual plans can be spread across twelve months or counted at renewal. Trials can count or not. Tax, discounts, refunds and failed payments each have several defensible treatments, and the choices move the number by a lot.
So the useful question is not whether a figure is verified. It is whether the rule was published in advance and applied to everyone identically. Two verified numbers computed under different rules are not comparable, and a product that will not tell you its rule is asking for more trust than the badge earns. Ours is published in full.
A verified figure tells a reader the business is real this month. It does not tell them it will be real next year, which is usually the thing they are actually weighing when they pick a larger competitor instead of you.
That takes a history rather than a number: every month, going back as far as your payments do, with the decisions you made marked on the dates you made them. Thonest publishes that as a page and as an embed for your own site. How it compares to the other options, and what goes on your site.
Connect Stripe — or Paddle, Polar, Dodo Payments, RevenueCat, Superwall, Creem or Lemon Squeezy — and your verified history appears. Nothing is public until you publish it.