At a glance
The count of successful Recharge subscription charges in the period. Each rebill, each prepaid annual upfront, each Recharge Checkout first-order is one transaction; build-a-box add-ons inside a single charge do NOT count as separate transactions (they roll into the parent charge). For subscription-only DTC brands this is the closest proxy to “active billing subscribers” within a 30-day window, but it is not a subscriber count, it is a charge count.
| What it counts | COUNT(*) from Recharge /charges where status = SUCCESS over the window. One row per processed charge, regardless of size. |
| API endpoint | GET /charges. Counted, not amount-summed. |
| Subscription rebills + Checkout + prepaid + swaps | All counted. charge_type = recurring (the bulk), charge_type = checkout (Recharge Checkout first-orders), charge_type = child_swap (mid-cycle plan changes). |
| Build-a-box add-ons | NOT counted as separate transactions. Add-ons roll into the parent monthly charge as additional line items inside the same total_price. |
| Failed / declined payments | Excluded. Only SUCCESS. Failed charges sit in rec_decline_rate. |
| Refunds / chargebacks | The original successful charge still counts. Refund or dispute on top is tracked separately. |
| Currency | Currency-neutral count, multi-currency stores see one combined transaction count across USD + GBP + EUR rebills. |
| Time window | 30D vsP default. |
| Alert trigger | drop >15% vsP (mirrors volume), sentiment_key: revenue_trend. |
| Subscriber-count caveat | A monthly subscriber bills once per month; an annual prepaid bills once per year. So 30-day transaction count ≈ active monthly subscribers + (1/12) of annual cohort + first-month new acquisitions. NOT a clean active-subscriber count. Use the Recharge Subscriptions list for that. |
| Roles | owner, finance, operations |
Calculation
Calculated automatically from your Recharge data. See the At a glance summary above for what the metric tracks and the worked example below for a typical reading.Worked example
“Daily Greens Co” (the same Athletic Greens-style supplement brand). 30-day window 03 Apr 26 to 02 May 26.| Cohort | Successful charges | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly rebills, USD | 18,420 | Core monthly subscribers across all signup cohorts |
| Monthly rebills, GBP | 2,140 | UK Shopify Markets monthly subscribers |
| Annual prepaid renewals | 312 | Customers whose annual anniversary fell in this window |
| Recharge Checkout first-orders (new acq) | 1,840 | New monthly subscribers acquired this period |
| Mid-cycle plan swaps | 84 | Subscribers swapping plans (charged delta) |
| Total successful charges | 22,796 | This card |
- 22,796 transactions does not equal 22,796 subscribers. The actual active-subscriber count is higher because (a) annual prepaid subscribers only billed once during the period, but they’re active for 11 more months, (b) some monthly subscribers may have been in dunning and had no successful charge this period. The Recharge Subscriptions list gives the real active count.
- 80% USD / 9% GBP transaction split mirrors the revenue split. If the AOV gap between USD and GBP is small (USD 79 vs GBP 65, similar after FX), the transaction-count split should match the revenue split closely. Big divergence = AOV mismatch.
- 8% of transactions are Checkout first-orders (new acquisition). That ratio of
new_acquisition / total_billing_chargesis the single most useful Recharge health metric. <5% means starvation (acquisition can’t replace churn); 8, 12% is healthy growth; >15% means you’re in heavy paid-acquisition spend mode. - Annual prepaid renewals look small (1.4%) but each is high value (USD 790). They contribute outsized revenue per transaction (12, 13% of revenue from 1.4% of transactions). Plan-mix shift toward annual reduces the transaction count over time even as revenue grows.
- Plan swaps under 1% is normal. Heavy swap activity indicates customers shopping inside the subscription (good for retention) or on the verge of cancellation (bad). Cross-reference with cancellation rate.
Sibling cards merchants should reference together
| Card | Why pair it with Total Transactions |
|---|---|
rec_total_volume | Volume / transactions = AOV. The two together tell the story. |
rec_avg_transaction | The AOV view. Shifting plan mix moves AOV without moving transaction count much. |
rec_volume_trend | Daily transaction count tracks volume on cohort-anchor days. |
rec_decline_rate | Successful + declined = attempted. Declined rate × attempted = the gap to “true subscriber count”. |
rec_success_rate | The complementary success-rate view. |
Shopify total_orders | Upstream order count. Recharge subset: recharge_txns ≤ shopify_orders. |
| Shopify Payments / Stripe transaction count | Processor-side count; should bracket from above. |
Reconciling against the vendor’s own dashboard
Where to look in the Recharge merchant portal: Sign in at admin.rechargepayments.com. The closest comparable view is:Recharge Admin → Charges → All charges (filter “Status: Success”, date range)The total at the top of the filtered list is the comparable number. Analytics → Subscriptions → Activity also exposes daily charge counts. Other Recharge views and what they actually count:
- Subscriptions → Active: active subscription contracts (NOT charges in window). Higher than this card for any merchant with annual prepaid customers.
- Customers → All: all customers including past-cancelled. Much higher.
- Orders → All: 1:1 with charges in nearly all cases (one Shopify order per Recharge charge).
| Reason | Direction | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Time zone | Boundary days off | Recharge admin: store timezone. Vortex IQ: UTC. Single-day cards are most affected. |
| Failed-then-recovered timing | Theirs may flip between snapshots | Same as Total Volume. |
| Refresh lag | Ours lower for “today” | Periodic sync. |
| Pagination on extreme volumes | Ours sub-2-min lag | Recharge API caps 40 req/sec. |
| Comparison | Expected relationship | When divergence is legitimate |
|---|---|---|
rec_total_transactions ↔ shopify.total_orders | recharge ≤ shopify | Shopify orders include non-subscription orders. Subscription brands typically 70, 95% Recharge share of Shopify orders. |
rec_total_transactions ↔ Shopify Payments / Stripe transactions | recharge ≤ processor_txns | Processor sees Recharge plus all non-Recharge orders. |
rec_total_transactions × rec_avg_transaction ≈ rec_total_volume | Always | The internal identity. Small drift if a Checkout-only merchant has special pricing logic. |
Known limitations / merchant FAQs
“Is this my active subscriber count?” No. It’s the count of successful charges in the window. Active subscribers include annual prepaid customers who didn’t bill this period (already paid 12 months ago) and dunning customers who failed every retry this period. For active subscriber count use the Recharge Subscriptions list filtered tostatus = active.
“My subscriber count is going up but transaction count is flat, why?”
Plan-mix shift toward annual prepaid is the usual cause. New annual subscribers contribute 1 transaction at signup then 0 for 11 months; new monthly subscribers contribute 1 every month. If new acquisition is shifting toward annual (often because of a discount that promotes the annual tier), monthly transaction count plateaus even as the underlying subscriber base grows.
“Build-a-box add-ons should bump transaction count, why don’t they?”
Add-ons attach to the parent monthly charge as line items. total_price rises (a USD 79 monthly + USD 18 collagen + USD 12 vitamin D adds = USD 109 single charge), but it’s still ONE charge in /charges. AOV cards reflect this; transaction count does not.
“Plan swaps, are those mid-cycle prorations counted?”
Yes, charge_type = child_swap is counted. The amount is usually small (the proration delta, not the full plan price), so swaps inflate the transaction count slightly more than they inflate volume. If you see a sudden swap-count spike, it usually means a campaign offered a downgrade path and many subscribers took it.
“How does this compare to my Shopify order count?”
Recharge transactions are typically 70, 95% of Shopify orders for subscription-first brands. Non-Recharge Shopify orders include: one-time storefront purchases (a customer buying a one-time product via Shopify checkout), gift card purchases, manual orders the merchant created in admin, draft orders converted to live. The gap between Recharge txns and Shopify orders is your one-time / non-subscription business.
“Recharge Checkout first-orders count, but post-purchase upsell rebills don’t, why?”
Post-purchase upsell flows where the first order is on Shopify Checkout (not Recharge Checkout) put the first charge on Shopify Payments / Stripe directly without going through Recharge’s /charges. Only the second monthly rebill (the first scheduled rebill) shows up here. So new-acquisition reading on this card under-counts for stores using post-purchase Recharge attach.
“My transaction count dropped 20% but my MRR is flat, what does that mean?”
Almost always a plan-mix shift to annual prepaid. Annual customers bill once a year, so converting 1,000 monthly subscribers to annual reduces the monthly transaction count by 1,000 × 11/12 = 917 immediately, while MRR (smoothed) stays stable. This is a good business outcome typically (annual customers churn less and pay upfront), but it reads as a transaction-count cliff.
“Failed charges that get recovered by dunning, do they count once or twice?”
Once, on the recovery date. The original failure stays in /charges with status = ERROR and is excluded; the retry, when successful, has status = SUCCESS and counts here. Recharge does not double-count.