Spreadsheet or paid dashboard for tracking side projects?

From the SoleOS answers series — written about our own product space; grounded in published definitions and documented behavior, never invented numbers.

A spreadsheet is the right tool for 1-2 side projects and a single data source — it's free, flexible, and you already know how to use it. A paid dashboard starts earning its keep once you're pulling numbers from 3+ sources (Stripe, RevenueCat, GA4, App Store Connect) across multiple apps and the manual copy-paste is eating an hour or more a week. The honest answer is: don't buy tooling ahead of the pain, but don't ignore the pain once it shows up either.

This isn't really a "which is better" question. It's a "what does my portfolio actually look like right now" question. Let's work through it properly.

What a spreadsheet does well

If you run one or two apps and pull revenue from one place — say Stripe, or just RevenueCat — a spreadsheet is genuinely fine. You can build a simple MRR tracker in an afternoon: paste in monthly totals, compute month-over-month growth with a formula, chart it. No subscription cost, no third-party access to your accounts, full control over what "MRR" means to you.

Spreadsheets also win when your needs are non-standard. Want to track a metric nobody's built a connector for — waitlist signups from a Notion form, or manual B2B deal notes? A spreadsheet handles arbitrary data without complaint. Dashboards are built around common data sources; if your project doesn't fit that mold, rows and columns are still the most flexible tool you own.

The real cost of a spreadsheet isn't the tool — it's the update loop. Every week (or, realistically, every time you remember to), you log into Stripe, into RevenueCat, into App Store Connect, and manually transcribe numbers. That's fine at low volume. It stops being fine as the number of accounts multiplies.

Where the manual-update tax starts to bite

The math is simple: if you run N apps and each app pulls from M data sources, you're doing N × M logins every time you check numbers. At 2 apps and 1 source, that's 2 checks. At 6 apps and 3 sources each (Stripe or RevenueCat for revenue, plus an analytics tool, plus a store console), that's 18 logins — and that's before you reconcile the fact that Stripe and RevenueCat count things differently, or that App Store revenue is net of Apple's cut while Stripe isn't.

This is the point where people either stop checking their numbers as often as they should, or they build an increasingly fragile spreadsheet with API pulls and Zapier steps that breaks whenever a schema changes. Both outcomes cost more than the spreadsheet saves in fees.

A second cost that's easy to underestimate: comparison across projects. A spreadsheet built for one app's MRR doesn't automatically tell you which of your six apps is actually worth your next two weeks. You end up building a second spreadsheet-of-spreadsheets to roll it up, and that meta-layer is where errors creep in — stale currency conversions, forgotten refund adjustments, a formula that references last quarter's row.

The actual decision framework

Ask three questions:

1. How many apps, and how many data sources per app? Multiply them. Under 4-5 total connections, a spreadsheet is usually still cheaper in time than money. Above that, the update loop is probably costing you more than $19-39/month in your own time.
2. Do you need cross-project comparison, or just per-project tracking? If you only ever look at one app at a time, spreadsheets scale fine — just duplicate the tab. If you regularly ask "which of my apps should I focus on this month," you need something that normalizes metrics across projects, which spreadsheets do badly without real engineering effort.
3. Do you want projections, or just history? Spreadsheets are great at showing what happened. Forecasting growth with any statistical rigor — enough data points, a real confidence measure — is more setup than most solo founders will do twice.

If the answer to all three leans toward "small and simple," keep the spreadsheet. We even maintain a free spreadsheet template for exactly that case — there's no reason to pay for software you don't need yet.

What a paid dashboard actually buys you

The pitch for a dashboard isn't "better numbers" — a spreadsheet fed correctly has the same numbers. The pitch is time and consistency: one login instead of N×M, one definition of MRR applied the same way across every app, and a rollup view that updates itself instead of waiting for you to remember.

SoleOS, for full disclosure, is built for exactly this comparison problem — this post is written by the team behind it, so take the framing with that in mind. It connects to Stripe, RevenueCat, GA4, Search Console, App Store Connect, Play Console, and a few others, pulls metrics on a schedule, and gives you one dashboard across up to 40 projects depending on plan. If you're only tracking one app's revenue from one source, you don't need it — a spreadsheet or even the connector's own dashboard does the job. Where it earns a $19-79/month price tag is when the number of source-app combinations gets past what you'll reliably update by hand.

One thing worth knowing before you connect anything, anywhere: read what's actually shared and what scopes are requested — a dashboard is only worth the tradeoff if you trust what it's touching. It's also worth checking the metrics dictionary for any tool you consider, dashboard or spreadsheet, because "MRR" and "growth rate" get defined inconsistently across products and that's a more common source of confusion than people expect.

A middle path: start free, upgrade the pain point

You don't have to choose once and commit forever. A reasonable path:

• 1-2 projects, 1 source each: spreadsheet, checked weekly.
• 3-5 projects, or 2+ sources per project: spreadsheet with a scheduled reminder, or a free tier of a single-purpose tool (RevenueCat's own dashboard, Stripe's own reporting) until the reconciliation pain starts.
• 6+ projects, or you're spending real time on the rollup: this is where a portfolio dashboard's monthly cost is probably lower than your hourly cost of manual updates. You can see what that looks like with the live demo before deciding, and pricing is transparent about what each tier includes.

If you're already at the point where you're asking "which of my apps is actually worth my time," the deeper question isn't spreadsheet-vs-dashboard — it's how you're deciding at all. Real numbers from a 10-app portfolio is a more honest look at what running many small products actually does to your metrics and your time.

Frequently asked questions

Can I just build my own dashboard with a spreadsheet and API calls?

Yes, and plenty of technical founders do — Google Sheets with Apps Script pulling from the Stripe or RevenueCat API is a legitimate setup. The tradeoff is maintenance: API schemas change, auth tokens expire, and you're now the person who has to fix a broken pull at 11pm before your weekly review. It's a good option if you enjoy that kind of tinkering and only have a couple of sources. It gets harder to justify past 3-4 connections.

At what point does a spreadsheet actually become slower than a dashboard?

There's no universal number, but a rough gut-check: if updating your tracker takes more than 20-30 minutes a week, or you've skipped checking your numbers twice in the last month because it felt like a chore, the manual loop is already costing you more than most dashboard subscriptions would.

Do I need a paid dashboard if I only have one app?

Almost certainly not. Single-app tracking is a solved problem with free or near-free tools — Stripe's own dashboard, RevenueCat's charts, GA4's default reports. Portfolio dashboards earn their price on the cross-project comparison and the reduced login count, neither of which matters with one app.

Will a dashboard tell me things a spreadsheet can't?

Not in terms of raw numbers — same source data, same math, if built correctly. What it typically adds is consistency (same metric definition everywhere), automated freshness, and in SoleOS's case, AI-assisted commentary built only from aggregated metrics and project names, never raw events or customer identities. Whether that's worth paying for depends entirely on how much the manual update loop is currently costing you.

Should I trust a spreadsheet's MRR number over a dashboard's?

Trust whichever one you've actually verified against the source. Reconciliation mistakes happen in both — a forgotten refund row in a spreadsheet is just as wrong as a misconfigured connector. Whatever tool you use, check the formula against the source of truth (usually Stripe or your app store) at least once a quarter.