LivePlan vs Upmetrics vs Brixx for a SaaS Startup (2026): Prices and the Missing SaaS Metrics

LivePlan, Upmetrics and Brixx are business-plan and small-business forecasting tools, priced from $14 to $75 a month (read on their pricing pages on October 22, 2026). All three can model subscription revenue as signups, a price, a renewal period and a churn rate, and all three output a profit and loss, balance sheet and cash flow that a bank or SBA lender expects. What none of them shows, on its own pricing page or in its help docs, is the SaaS layer an investor asks about: an MRR waterfall that splits new, expansion, contraction and churned MRR, churn by customer cohort, net revenue retention, or CAC payback. If you need a lender-ready business plan, any of the three works and LivePlan is the most established. If you are raising from SaaS investors, use a SaaS-native model, either a spreadsheet template or a tool built around MRR.

Quick comparison

Prices verified on liveplan.com/pricing, upmetrics.co/pricing and brixx.com/pricing on October 22, 2026, from a German IP; all three showed prices in US dollars (Brixx adds "All prices exclude local taxes"). Revenue features from LivePlan's help center (updated August 10, 2026), Upmetrics' recurring charges article (updated September 18, 2026) and Brixx's Subscription Component article, read the same day. "Not found" means we did not see it on the pricing page or in those articles; we have not run a live account on any of the three.

What each one costs

LivePlan

Two priced plans, with a 25% discount for paying yearly. The detail that matters for a startup is on the plan card: Standard greys out what-if scenarios, budget vs actual dashboards, the auto-updating forecast, Export to Excel and the QuickBooks Online and Xero connection. You get those on Premium. A Team column appears in the comparison table with no price, and a LivePlan Expert add-on (one-on-one video support) costs $30 a month.

Prices verified on liveplan.com/pricing on October 22, 2026.

Upmetrics

The cheapest of the three on a yearly bill at $14 a month. Premium includes AI plan writing, AI industry research, an AI pitch deck builder, a forecast of up to 7 years, Excel export and QuickBooks Online and Xero. Professional adds companies and client management for consultants. Its FAQ says plainly that there is no free trial; the safety net is a 15-day refund.

Prices verified on upmetrics.co/pricing on October 22, 2026.

Brixx

Brixx prices by the number of plans and how far ahead you can forecast, not by features: every tier says "All features included" and unlimited users. Foundations only forecasts one year ahead, which is too short for a fundraising model, so most founders would need Professional (3 years, $480 a year). It is the only one of the three with a free trial.

Prices verified on brixx.com/pricing on October 22, 2026.

Why business-plan tools lack SaaS metrics

A business plan answers a lender's question: will this business earn and keep enough cash to repay the loan? So these tools are built around the three financial statements, and revenue is a list of streams, each one units times price. A subscription stream fits that shape: customers sign up, a share cancel each month, the rest pay again.

A SaaS investor asks a different question: where does next year's recurring revenue come from, and how much of it is already in the customer base? Answering it takes four things these tools do not show natively:

• An MRR waterfall. Starting MRR plus new, plus expansion, minus contraction, minus churn. LivePlan's and Upmetrics' recurring charges articles describe signups, churn and price, with no field for upgrades or downgrades. Brixx's subscription component takes cancellations and refunds, not upgrades.
• Cohort churn. Customers who joined in January rarely churn like customers who joined in June. All three apply one churn rate to the customer count (LivePlan and Upmetrics apply it at the start of each month or renewal period). See cohort analysis for why that average hides the problem.
• Net revenue retention. With churn as the only movement on existing customers, NRR can never go above 100% in the model, so a product that grows inside its accounts looks worse on paper than it is.
• CAC payback, which needs acquisition spend tied to the new customers it bought.

Here is what the missing expansion input does to one cohort. Take customers worth $50,000 of MRR, with 2% of them cancelling each month, and the survivors expanding their spend by 3% a month through seats and upgrades. A churn-only subscription stream shows that cohort at $39,236 of MRR after 12 months, an NRR of about 78%. With expansion in the model it ends at $55,941, about 112%. The gap is $16,705 of MRR, roughly $200,000 of ARR, from one cohort, and it is the number a SaaS investor reads first. (Illustrative inputs; a real model also applies contraction.)

Can you work around it? Partly. You can add a second revenue stream called "expansion" in any of the three and type in the numbers, and Brixx has global and local drivers for custom inputs. Brixx's own fintech industry page says you can "Model 2%, 5%, 10% churn to project lost MRR and CAC payback". But then you are hand-building the SaaS logic inside a tool that does not check it, which is the same job as a spreadsheet at a monthly fee.

Which one, if you only need a business plan

• LivePlan if the reader is a bank or an SBA lender and you want a well-known format: step-by-step instructions, 550+ sample plans and lender-ready statements. Budget for Premium ($30 a month yearly) if you want QuickBooks or Xero, scenarios or an Excel export.
• Upmetrics if price and the writing help matter most: $14 a month yearly with AI writing, a pitch deck builder, Excel export and accounting sync on the entry plan.
• Brixx if you run on Xero, want several people in the plan (unlimited users on every tier), or want to try it before paying.

What to use for a SaaS model instead

• A spreadsheet template, free. Our free SaaS finance templates include an MRR forecast, an ARR waterfall, runway and a fundraising model, as Excel downloads with no email. You own the logic; you also own the maintenance. Excel vs Adlega covers when that stops working.
• A SaaS-native tool. Adlega builds revenue cohort by cohort into an MRR waterfall (new, expansion, churn), with churn, CAC, LTV, CAC payback, burn and runway as outputs and an AI CFO that explains each number. Free plan; paid from $49 a month ($41 billed yearly). The Founder plan includes one actuals-sync integration; the Growth plan's Stripe, Chargebee and Google integrations are still rolling out, so most inputs today are drivers you enter.
• Other low-cost options: ProjectionHub (free single templates, $499 lifetime for all), Sturppy ($147 one-time, quiet since 2023), or Forecastr if you want a person to build the model ($5,000 a year and up). The wider field is in best SaaS financial modeling software.

A workable split for a founder who needs both: write the narrative in a business-plan tool if a lender wants that format, and keep the numbers in a SaaS model so the MRR, retention and runway an investor checks come from one place.

FAQ

Is LivePlan good for SaaS businesses?

For a lender-ready business plan, yes. For a SaaS investor model, it is thin: its recurring charges stream takes signups, a churn rate, a price and a renewal period, and its help article has no fields for upgrades, expansion or MRR, so it cannot show net revenue retention above 100% without a manual workaround.

LivePlan vs Upmetrics: which is better?

Upmetrics is cheaper ($14 vs $15 a month yearly) and puts accounting sync and Excel export on its entry plan, where LivePlan keeps them for Premium ($30 a month yearly). LivePlan has the larger sample-plan library and the longer money-back window (35 days vs 15). Neither has SaaS metrics.

How much does LivePlan cost?

Standard is $20 a month, or $15 a month paid annually; Premium is $40, or $30 paid annually, as of October 22, 2026. There is no free trial; every subscription has a 35-day money-back guarantee.

Does Upmetrics have a free trial?

No. Upmetrics' FAQ says it does not offer a free trial; all plans come with a 15-day money-back guarantee. Premium is $19 a month, or $14 a month billed yearly.

How much does Brixx cost?

Foundations $25 a month ($240 a year), Professional $50 ($480 a year) and Enterprise $75 ($720 a year), with every feature on every plan; the tiers differ in number of plans and forecast length. There is a 7-day free trial.

Does LivePlan, Upmetrics or Brixx track MRR and churn?

All three take a churn rate on a subscription revenue stream. None of the help articles we read describes an MRR waterfall, expansion revenue, cohort churn or NRR as an output.

Related: Excel vs Adlega, best SaaS financial modeling software, how to build a SaaS financial model, and the MRR growth calculator.

Where Adlega is weaker

Adlega is self-serve: you build the model yourself. The AI CFO guides you and explains every number, but no analyst builds it for you, so a founder who wants the work done by a person may prefer a done-for-you service. Its integrations (Stripe, Chargebee, Google Analytics, Google Ads), forecast-vs-actuals and scenario comparison are still rolling out on the Growth plan, so today most numbers come from the drivers you enter rather than synced data. And it is built around SaaS metrics, so a business without recurring revenue will get less from it than from a general-purpose planning tool.