# Revenue attribution — which channel produces customers

> Connect Stripe read-only and see which acquisition channel produced paying
> customers — first-touch, write-once, with no cookies and no join to any
> visitor identifier.

Every analytics tool can rank where traffic comes from. The question a business
needs answered is which of those channels produced the people who pay — and the
channel sending the most visitors is very often not the one sending the most
customers. The attribution report is sorted by MRR, deliberately: sorting by
visitors reliably puts the channel that sends crowds at the top while the
channel that sends customers looks small.

## Two ledgers, joined only on a channel name

**The traffic ledger stays anonymous.** Visits are counted the way Tastatur
always counts them: no cookies, nothing stored on the device, a visitor
identifier that stops working after 24 hours. The referrer is kept as a hostname
only and classified into a channel the moment it is written.

**The revenue ledger is your own customer data.** Customers, subscriptions and
payments are data your application already holds. Your server sends them to
Tastatur directly — authenticated, server-to-server, under your own relationship
with your customers. Email addresses are hashed on receipt and never stored in
the clear.

**There is no column joining the two.** Nothing links a customer to a visitor
identifier — not at collection, not later. The ledgers meet only in the report,
on channel names. The source is AGPL-3.0, so this is verifiable rather than a
promise.

## The integration, in three steps

The browser knows where somebody came from; the payment happens somewhere else,
possibly days later, possibly on another device. With nothing stored on the
visitor's device there is no cookie to join the two — so the attribution travels
*with* the signup and the payment.

**1. Capture the first touch on the landing page.** Store it in your own form
state or user record — calling it at the end of your funnel would read your own
checkout as the traffic source.

```javascript
const attribution = tastatur.attribution()
// { source, medium, campaign, landing_path, referrer_host, first_seen_at }
```

**2. Send it when they sign up,** from your server, with an API key from your
site's settings. The email is hashed on receipt.

```http
POST https://tastatur.dev/api/v1/identify
Authorization: Bearer tk_...
Content-Type: application/json

{
  "external_id": "user_9182",
  "email": "person@example.com",
  "attribution": { "source": "reddit", "medium": "social", "landing_path": "/pricing" }
}
```

**3. Attach it to Stripe Checkout.** This is what makes attribution survive a
closed tab, or a payment finished three days later on a phone.

```javascript
stripe.checkout.sessions.create({
  mode: 'subscription',
  line_items: [...],
  client_reference_id: user.id,
  metadata: tastatur.checkoutMetadata(attribution)
})
```

**First touch wins, and is never overwritten.** Apps call identify on every
sign-in, so last-write-wins would re-attribute January's Reddit customer to
whatever they searched in March, and every paid channel would decay towards
"Direct" on its own. Attribution is written once; only an earlier first touch
can amend it.

## Connect Stripe, read-only

Connecting Stripe imports two years of history and keeps revenue flowing in as
it happens — subscriptions, invoices, refunds, disputes. The connection is a
Stripe App whose permissions are all read: Stripe shows each one, item by item,
before install. No code path writes to a connected Stripe account, and no access
token is stored — disconnect from either end, and revenue already recorded stays
yours to keep or erase.

## Said plainly

- **This part of Tastatur is not anonymous, and does not pretend to be.** A
  customer record carries the identifier your app assigned, a hashed email, and
  a first-touch channel — data your application already holds about somebody who
  signed up for it, confined to five tables, deletable when you say so.
- **Your visitors are not in it.** Someone who browses and never signs up exists
  only in the anonymous ledger, under an identifier that stopped working the day
  they visited.
- **Revenue never appears on a public shared dashboard.** A shared link shows
  traffic, never money.
- **It works self-hosted.** Revenue attribution is deliberately not tied to our
  billing: it is about whether you can connect your processor, not whether we
  can charge you.

## Where to go next

- [Integration docs](https://tastatur.dev/docs.md) — the attribution section has
  the full API shapes
- [What gets collected](https://tastatur.dev/privacy) — the technical account of the
  anonymous side