Payback analytics for solo founders

Analytics that shows what pays you back.

Ripples connects your traffic, signups, Stripe revenue and Google Ads spend with one script tag, then shows which channels bring customers who stay.

Free until $1K MRR No credit card Live in 30 seconds
The Ripples dashboard: a plain-language summary sentence across the top, then scorecards for new visitors, active users, signups, activations and revenue, a traffic chart against the previous period, and a live map of where visitors are.

The problem

Your numbers live in three places that don't talk.

Stripe $2,847

Knows who paid.
Not where they came from.

Google Ads $1,204

Knows what you spent.
Not what it bought.

Analytics 8,431

Knows who visited.
Not which ones mattered.

“Which channel brings customers who actually pay and are still here in two months?”

Ripples is the one tool that holds all three at once: spend, revenue and retention against the channel that brought them.

Payback

Every other tool stops on day one.

Return on ad spend example project
break even day 13 day 41 day 0 day 60
Still active, by channel same three channels
100% Reddit 60% Twitter/X 21% Google Ads 9% day 0 day 30 day 60

Reddit retains 60% and pays back on day 13. Google Ads retains 9% and never does.

ROAS is a snapshot.

Return measured on the day of the click, then reported as if it were the answer.

Churn eats the return.

A customer who pays $29 and leaves in month two did not pay back your ad spend.

So payback is a retention number.

Ripples splits retention cohorts by the channel that brought each customer. That join is the product.

What you see

Four things you never had to configure.

Where they actually came from

Not just “organic” and “direct”.

Visitors by source, last 7 days
Hacker News 312
Reddit 189
Organic search 112
Twitter/X 71

Tuesday's spike was a Hacker News thread. Ripples links you to it.

Are they signing up? Paying?

Pre-built. No event definitions, no funnel wizard.

This month
847 visited
14% of them signed up
119 signed up
24% of them paid
29 paid

Numbers a person can read

No sessions, no bounce rate, no DAU/MAU.

Top of your dashboard

This month 847 people visited, up 12%. 119 signed up. $2,847 in revenue. Hacker News sent 312 people.

Your first payment Best day ever 14 day streak

Three projects, one screen

So you know which one deserves your Saturday.

Your projects
My SaaS Tool $2,400 up 12%
Chrome Extension $340 flat
Telegram Bot $80 down 8%

How it works

Three steps, and the first one is a paste.

  1. 1

    Paste one line

    <script src="ripples.sh/abc123"></script>

    Any stack. Or npx ripples init for Next.js, Telegram Mini Apps and native.

  2. 2

    Watch the first visit land

    Open your site in another tab and watch the counter tick. Real time, not "in a few hours".

  3. 3

    Sign up only when you want more

    You get an anonymous dashboard URL straight away. An account is for revenue, payback and retention.

What Ripples connects to

One dashboard for traffic, revenue and ad payback.

Ripples (ripples.sh) is a web and product analytics tool for solo founders and small teams. You add a lightweight tracking script to your website or app, then optionally connect Google Ads and Stripe. Ripples brings traffic, signups, payments and ad spend into a single dashboard so you can see what is working, and when your marketing actually pays for itself.

Tracking script

A single <script> tag, or npx ripples init, records pageviews, referrers, signups and custom events from your website, Telegram Mini App or native app. No cookies, no setup wizard.

Google Ads

Sign in with Google to connect your Google Ads account. Ripples imports your daily campaign spend through the Google Ads API and combines it with your revenue to show ROAS and payback per channel. Read-only. We never change your campaigns.

Stripe and friends

Link Stripe, Paddle, Polar or Lemon Squeezy to import payments and subscriptions. Ripples ties each payment back to the visit and channel that drove it, so you can see which sources produce paying customers rather than just clicks.

Custom billing

Rolled your own billing, or would rather not connect an account? Send a revenue event instead, one call per payment. Same attribution, same payback, same free plan. Nothing about Ripples assumes a particular payment provider.

How Ripples uses your Google Account data

Connecting Google Ads is entirely optional. When you choose to connect it, Ripples uses Google OAuth to ask for your permission, and requests read-only access to your Google Ads account (the https://www.googleapis.com/auth/adwords scope). Here is exactly what that means:

What we access
Read-only Google Ads reporting data: your campaign names, daily cost and spend, clicks, and impressions, plus the list of Google Ads accounts you manage so you can pick which one to connect.
Why we need it
To import your daily ad spend and match it against the revenue Ripples already tracks, so we can calculate your true ROAS and show how many days each campaign takes to pay back. This is the core payback feature of the product.
What we do with it
Spend data is stored securely and displayed only inside your own private Ripples dashboard. It is never shown to anyone else.
What we never do
We never create, edit, pause or delete your campaigns; never access your customer match or contact lists; and never sell, share, or use your Google data for advertising, training models, or any purpose other than showing you your own analytics. You can disconnect at any time, which stops all access.

Ripples' use of information received from Google APIs adheres to the Google API Services User Data Policy, including the Limited Use requirements. Full details are in our Privacy Policy.

Before you get excited

Ripples is not the right tool for everyone.

No session replay or heatmaps.
Use PostHog, or Microsoft Clarity, which is free.
No feature flags or A/B testing.
Use PostHog, Statsig or GrowthBook.
Not open source, not self-hostable.
Use Umami, Plausible, Matomo or Rybbit.
Not much use before you have revenue.
We connect spend to revenue. No revenue, no point, yet.

And past roughly $10K MRR you will outgrow us, which is fine. We will help you move. The full list

Pricing

You pay when it works.

Free until your project crosses $1K MRR. Then $9 a month for one project, or $19 for up to ten. Every plan has every feature.

Free $0 until $1K MRR
Solo $9/mo one project
Portfolio $19/mo up to ten projects
See what is in each plan

One line of code. Numbers in 30 seconds.

Free until $1K MRR. No credit card. Nothing gated.