DriftcheckCompare
How Driftcheck compares
Driftcheck is a read-only, detection-only drift detector. It compares Stripe against your own database and reports where they disagree; it never retries a payment, runs dunning, or predicts churn. That narrow job is easy to confuse with three other kinds of tool, so here is exactly how it differs from each.
What Driftcheck is, and what it is not
What it is
A read-only reconciliation layer. Driftcheck reads your Stripe with a read-only key (read-only is enforced by Stripe, not by us), compares it against your application database or a CSV export, and emails a ranked PDF of every place the two disagree. Each finding traces to the exact Stripe object and, where a CSV is involved, the cell that disagrees. It runs 10 deterministic detectors and invents no numbers.
What it is not
It is not an analytics dashboard, a payment-recovery engine, or a churn predictor. It will not retry a failed charge, send a dunning sequence, deflect a cancellation, or forecast revenue. Those are deliberate omissions: detection is the wedge. Driftcheck tells you precisely what is wrong, with evidence, and leaves the decision about what to do to you.
The tools teams weigh us against
Three categories come up most: subscription analytics, failed-payment recovery, and Stripe’s own native tooling. Driftcheck is complementary to all three. Here is the key difference in each case, with a full side-by-side comparison behind every link.
- Baremetrics: Baremetrics reads Stripe and reports on it (and Recover acts on failed payments). Driftcheck reads Stripe and your own database and reports only on where they disagree — it never retries a payment, never duns, never predicts churn. It's a read-only reconciliation layer, not a dashboard or a recovery tool. Read the full Baremetrics comparison.
- Churnkey / Stunning: Churnkey and Stunning act on failed payments — they retry charges and send dunning to recover revenue. Driftcheck is detection-only: it surfaces billing drift with evidence and never touches your billing. Recovery tools fix what they can see (a failed charge); Driftcheck also catches leaks dunning never sees — plan/price drift, ghost customers, webhook gaps, subscription-state mismatch — because those aren't payment failures at all. Read the full Churnkey / Stunning comparison.
- Stripe native: Stripe's tools see only Stripe's own data. They can tell you a webhook delivery returned a 2xx, but not whether your app actually persisted the event; they can show a subscription's status, but not that your app DB disagrees. Driftcheck is a detection-only layer that compares Stripe against your app database to find that cross-system drift — then hands you evidence, never acting on it. Read the full Stripe native comparison.
Questions
Is Driftcheck an alternative to Baremetrics, Churnkey, or Stripe Billing?
Not really, because it solves a different problem. Analytics tools report your Stripe numbers, recovery tools act on failed payments, and Stripe’s own tooling runs and monitors billing inside Stripe. Driftcheck does none of that: it compares Stripe against your own application database and reports only where the two silently disagree. It sits alongside those tools rather than replacing them.
Does Driftcheck replace my analytics or dunning tool?
No. Driftcheck is detection-only, so it never retries a payment, sends a dunning email, or predicts churn. Most teams keep their analytics and recovery tools and add Driftcheck as the read-only reconciliation check underneath, so they catch the leaks those tools structurally cannot see.
What does Driftcheck catch that these tools miss?
Cross-system drift: a ghost customer paying in Stripe with no matching account in your app, a subscription your app cancelled that Stripe still bills, a plan your app shows as Pro while Stripe charges Starter, a webhook your app returned 200 for and then silently failed to process. None of these are payment failures, so dunning never fires, and none live inside Stripe alone, so analytics and Stripe-native tools never surface them.
See it on your own Stripe
Find out where you are actually leaking.
Driftcheck reads your Stripe with a read-only key and emails a ranked PDF of every silent leak, each one traced to the exact Stripe object behind it.