Text S.A.: MRR Flatlines, but the API Meter Finally Starts Running

The North Star stopped twinkling

Text S.A. came to its Q2 FY2026/27 call on October 5 with a familiar script and one genuinely new number. Monthly recurring revenue grew 3.3% year over year but slipped 2.3% versus the June quarter. The redemption, if you can call it that, was that “September finally stopped the downward trend. We ended the month flat.” — Lucja Kaseja, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05 The company collected USD 23.61 million in payments for the quarter, up 6.2% year over year, though 2.4% below the record prior period.

Set that against the company's own ambition and the contrast sharpens. In July 2025, IR lead Marcin Droba was blunt about what success looked like: “anything below 2-digit area is not satisfying... 2-digit numbers are what we're looking for. We'd not be happy in single-digit area.” — Marcin Droba, Investor Relations team lead · 2025-07-17 Four quarters later, MRR is growing at a third of that threshold. The company that once told investors MRR was its “North Star” — Marcin Droba, Executive or Senior Management · 2026-01-05 is now celebrating a flat month as progress.

The bull case for the quarter rests on two softer signals. Customer churn fell clearly below 4%, and the share of MRR from customers paying more than USD 500 per month crept to 56%. But management immediately undercut its own victory lap: the churn improvement “may partly reflect the changing structure of our customer base with more larger customers. And it also reflects the fact that many customers have moved to annual contracts.” — Lucja Kaseja, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05 In other words, annual contracts flatter the churn reading by locking customers in, not by fixing the underlying acquisition problem.

The one number that is genuinely new

Buried in the middle of the prepared remarks was the freshest thing on the call: API revenue exceeded USD 450,000 and nearly doubled in three months. It is tiny against a USD 1.06 billion market cap, but it matters because it is monetizing the thing Text actually claims to be good at. Lucja Kaseja framed it in the company's founding language — that “monetizing and converting online businesses has always been at the heart of LiveChat.” — Lucja Kaseja, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05 The API business is the metered version of that pitch.

Management was refreshingly honest about its lumpiness. Droba warned that “even without that... bigger customers are buying some huge packages of calls of API calls” — Marcin Droba, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05, meaning a single enterprise can pre-buy months of usage and distort the line. The direction is right; the smoothness is not. And Kaseja conceded the company “do[es] not have that much data” — Lucja Kaseja, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05 on whether AI agent usage compounds inside accounts. The flagship customer story — Finnish retailer Nuvoo, where the AI agent handles over 70% of chats and sales through it grew more than fivefold — is compelling, but it is a sample of one, and the company knows it.

The offensive that keeps being postponed

The most telling moment of the call was not in the numbers; it was an analyst asking whether, given the admitted visibility problem, Text would reconsider rehiring the sales team it had just cut. Droba's answer was categorical: “no, we definitely not consider rehiring the sales team at the moment.” — Marcin Droba, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05 This is a genuinely recurring theme for the company — sales team was one of Text's biggest keyword movers back in the FY2023/24 era, and the same instinct to solve distribution without feet on the street is now repeating.

We believe we have one of the best, if not the best products in our category, but we still don't have the level of visibility that this product deserves... As a result, customer acquisition remains weak.

That admission is strikingly consistent with where Text was six months ago. In April, Droba conceded “we are not growing. We are not as successful at this moment at the acquisition” — Marcin Droba, Investor Relations or Executive (likely CEO or similar) · 2026-04-07, even while insisting no notable customers had been lost to peers. The difference now is that management has named the fix and started spending on it. Text's products appeared on Google Cloud, AWS and the ChatGPT marketplace in the quarter; 63 new features shipped; and the company redirected traffic toward text.com after seeing customer conversion for Text improve. Droba cautioned that marketplace credibility “needs a lot of time” — Marcin Droba, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05 — an accurate but notably unaggressive framing.

The migration clock is now ticking

What did change structurally is that the Text migration moved from voluntary to de facto mandatory at the bottom of the funnel. Lucja confirmed that “in September, we moved virtually all Starter plan customers from LiveChat to Text.” — Lucja Kaseja, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05 It is MRR-neutral for now — payments only reclassify next month — but it is the first real erosion of the legacy base. Kaseja also flagged the risk in leaning on the red, bold value of Text rebrand and case-study marketing: “this is an experiment and obviously, it comes with some risks.” — Lucja Kaseja, Investor Relations · 2026-10-05

Two loose ends linger. Deferred revenue sits at a record PLN 77.2 million, which should flow into reported revenue over coming quarters — a buffer, but also a reminder that cash collected and revenue recognized are diverging. And the HelpDesk payments decline that an analyst probed is pure timing of annual larger contracts, not a demand signal. Against all this, the cleanest read is that Text has a genuinely new monetization vector in API/usage-based pricing, a still-murky acquisition engine, and a churn metric flattered by contract mix. The company is honest about the first two; investors should watch whether the third is more structural than management lets on.