[jv22222]

Just a note that if you're using Stripe you get that upgrade downgrade history for free, so might not need the complexity.

Also ProfitWell plugs in to Stripe and does a pretty good job with analytics for that for free too.

Of course if you're using multiple payment providers you'll want to roll your own abstraction as the above comment describes.

[nfm]

The data isn't lost, but it's not straightforward to query if you don't have a record of it in your own database.

Eventually you'll want to find out what your resubscribe rate is, or what the average interval between subscriptions is. Answering these types of questions via Stripe's API is no fun.

[shimms]

Yup - we’ve always duplicated that data in our systems. Aside from anything, if Stripe/payment-processor-of-choice changes their data model, or rearranges feature tiers in the future to make reporting beyond the last 180 days an enterprise add on or whatever, we’d rather not be beholden to them to be able to analyse our business performance metrics.