Bastle vs Subscript

The question is where your revenue actually lives

This comparison resolves almost entirely on one fact about your business. If a customer signs a contract, finance issues an invoice, and payment arrives by bank transfer sixty days later, then your payment records are a lagging shadow of your revenue and any tool reading them is describing the shadow. Subscript is built for exactly that: the contract is the source of truth, ARR comes from its terms, and contracted-but-not-yet-invoiced revenue is a real number rather than an absence.

If a customer enters a card and Stripe charges it, the payment record is the revenue, and contract modelling solves a problem you do not have.

What Subscript does that Bastle does not

Contract-derived ARR and CARR, which is the whole model. Revenue recognition schedules. Accounts receivable automation — invoice chasing, collections, ageing — which is a genuinely different discipline from card dunning. And a metric library well past sixty entries, against Bastle's 28.

On that last point: Bastle's 28 metrics cover revenue, MRR movements and customer metrics, and every one of them is computed by a single engine so a figure on a dashboard, in the API and quoted by the assistant is the same figure. That is the design choice we would defend. It is still 28 rather than 60, and if your reporting requires committed ARR bridges and logo retention variants that we do not compute, the honest answer is that we do not compute them.

What Bastle does that Subscript does not

Ask takes a question in plain English, computes it through the metrics engine and cites the customers, subscriptions and invoices it used. Metric definitions are workspace policy — change the delinquency window or trial handling and history recalculates against the new rule — and every figure opens onto the formula, the period boundaries and the records that produced it.

Bastle also includes Recover for failed card payments and cancellation reason capture with save offers, both aimed at self-serve churn rather than contract non-renewal. And it is self-serve: connect and evaluate in a couple of minutes without a sales conversation, free while in beta. Subscript is sales-quoted, which for an enterprise buyer is normal and for a founder wanting to look at a product this afternoon is friction.

Hybrid businesses

Plenty of companies run both motions — self-serve at the bottom, contracts at the top — and neither tool covers that cleanly on its own. Subscript will model the contracts and treat the self-serve tail as a rounding error; Bastle will report the processor-billed revenue precisely and can accept the contract side through its import API, though pushing contract terms in is not the same as modelling them natively. Be sceptical of any vendor, including us, who tells you a hybrid revenue model is a solved problem.

Who wrote this page

Bastle did, and Bastle benefits if you choose Bastle. That is a bias no amount of good intent removes, so the useful thing is to make it checkable rather than to claim it away. Every capability claim above is specific enough to disprove in an afternoon, the case for the other product gets the same room as the case for ours, and anything that works differently rather than not at all is marked partial.

Read this alongside the other vendor's own documentation, not instead of it. If something here is wrong about their product, tell us: corrections are treated as bugs rather than as debate, the page gets fixed and its research date is reset so you can see it was revised. That applies whether the correction makes them look better or us look worse.