Mowt vs ProfitWell: pay $79, or stay free?

What free actually costs you, in hours not dollars

ProfitWell Metrics charges nothing, and this page won't pretend otherwise. But free has an operational bill. Paddle's own help docs say customers added or edited manually or through the API can take up to 90 minutes to show in your metrics, so the MRR figure you screenshot for an investor at 2pm may not include the deal that closed at 1.

Capterra reviewers report needing manual work to correct data inaccuracies, and describe changes taking hours to reflect in dashboards. Reporting granularity compounds it: reviewers complain the tool only offers monthly reporting when they need weekly, which means a mid-month churn spike hides until the month closes. And when something breaks, Capterra reviewers describe support responses that are slow or don't come at all, which is a rational allocation on Paddle's side (you're not paying them) but a real cost on yours.

Add it up honestly. If you check metrics once a month, the bill rounds to zero and free wins. If you check daily, you're paying in reconciliation time and stale screenshots, and $79/month for webhook-fast numbers starts looking like the cheaper option.

Two app stores, two different mobile experiences

On paper this row is a tie: both products ship native iOS and Android apps, and ProfitWell adds iOS home-screen widgets, which Mowt doesn't match. The gap is reliability, not existence. Reviewers on G2 and Capterra report that ProfitWell's push notifications for payment problems don't reliably trigger, which defeats the point of a metrics app in your pocket.

A failed-payment alert that arrives sometimes is arguably worse than none, because you stop checking manually and start trusting silence. That matters most for involuntary churn, where a card failure caught the same hour is recoverable and one discovered at month-end often isn't.

Mowt's iOS and Android apps carry every feature the web dashboard has, cohorts and forecasts included, and alerts fire off the same webhook stream that updates the dashboard in seconds. One disclosure: Mowt is younger, with a far smaller review footprint than ProfitWell's, so you should verify this claim yourself. Both apps are free to install, and both connect to Stripe read-only, so running the two side by side for a week costs nothing but the install time.

The Paddle funnel question

Paddle bought ProfitWell for $200M in May 2022, and the business logic is public: Metrics stays free because it feeds users into Paddle's paid billing platform and its Retain dunning product. That's not sinister, and it means the free tier is probably safe; killing it would kill the funnel. But it explains the product's trajectory.

A free funnel needs to exist more than it needs to improve, and the review record matches: Capterra reviewers described the interface as essentially unchanged for five-plus years, and the monthly-only reporting limitation has sat unaddressed through the same period. On the paid side of the funnel, one G2 reviewer reported a 10x price increase on enterprise terms after a support ticket, so the free front door and the negotiated back rooms are different economies.

Weigh that against Mowt's position: analytics is the whole company, not the top of someone else's funnel, so shipped improvements are the survival mechanism. The honest counterweight is that Paddle will still exist in five years and can fund Metrics indefinitely, while betting on a smaller independent tool is a bet you should size accordingly. That's why the 7-day trial needs no card.