Calculate customer churn, revenue churn, and net revenue retention in one place. Then see what your base looks like in two years, and how much a small retention improvement is actually worth.
Monthly churn
4.00%
Customers lost over customers at start
Annualised churn
38.7%
Compounded across twelve months
Customers remaining
960
After this period, before new signups
Rating
Healthy3% to 5% monthly for Self serve / SMB
Customer counts only tell half the story. These are the numbers investors and boards actually ask for.
Gross revenue churn
4.00%
Share of starting MRR lost
Gross revenue retention
96.0%
Revenue kept before any expansion
Net revenue retention
99.2%
Revenue kept after expansion is counted
Average customer lifetime
25.0 months
Customer lifetime value
$1,975
Revenue lost per year
$37.9K
Drag the slider to see what a retention improvement is worth over the next two years, assuming no new customers are added.
Extra customers at month 24
131
Extra MRR at month 24
$10.3K
Cumulative revenue gained
$171.1K
Summed across 24 months
The projection holds acquisition at zero on purpose. It isolates retention so you can see how much of your revenue base survives on its own, which is the part of the business that compounds.
At 99.2% net revenue retention you are leaking about 0.8% of your base each period. Closing that gap through upsells or seat growth would let new sales go entirely toward growth rather than replacement.
At 4.00% monthly churn you lose roughly 39% of your customer base annually, which is about $37.9K in recurring revenue. The average customer stays 25 months and is worth $1,975 over that lifetime.
Most churn benchmarks published online quote a single range, which is misleading. A self serve product charging 29 dollars a month and an enterprise platform on annual contracts are not playing the same game. These are the ranges this calculator grades against.
Credit card signups, low touch onboarding, monthly plans. Churn runs highest here because switching costs are low.
Sales assisted deals, multi seat accounts, mix of monthly and annual contracts. Expectations tighten considerably.
Annual or multi year contracts, procurement involved, deep integrations. Logo churn should be rare.
Churn is simple arithmetic, but there are four different numbers hiding behind the one word, and mixing them up is the most common reporting mistake in SaaS.
(customers lost / customers at start) x 100The share of accounts that cancelled. Use the count at the start of the period as the denominator, and do not include customers who signed up during the period, otherwise new arrivals will flatter the number.
(MRR lost to cancellations and downgrades / MRR at start) x 100The share of recurring revenue that disappeared. This can be lower than customer churn when the accounts you lose are small, or considerably higher when a single large account leaves.
((MRR at start - MRR lost) / MRR at start) x 100The mirror image of gross revenue churn. It never exceeds 100 percent because expansion is deliberately excluded, which makes it a clean measure of how well you hold onto what you already had.
((MRR at start - MRR lost + expansion MRR) / MRR at start) x 100The same calculation with upgrades, extra seats, and add-ons included. Above 100 percent means your existing base is growing by itself, which is the outcome every subscription business is aiming for.
A product starts the month with 800 customers paying an average of 60 dollars, so starting MRR is 48,000 dollars. During the month 32 customers cancel, taking 1,920 dollars of MRR with them, while existing customers upgrade by 2,400 dollars.
Notice the last line. Customer churn looks mediocre and net revenue retention looks good. Both are true at once, and reporting only one of them gives a misleading picture of the business.
Customer churn treats every account as equal. In reality the account paying 2,000 dollars a month and the one paying 29 are not the same loss, and a business can shed a lot of small accounts while growing comfortably. Net revenue retention fixes this by measuring money rather than logos, and by counting expansion alongside losses.
When net revenue retention sits above 100 percent, your existing customers spend more this period than last, even after everyone who left. The base grows on its own. Every new customer you add is genuine growth rather than a replacement, which is why investors treat it as one of the strongest signals a subscription business can produce.
Below 100 percent the arithmetic reverses. A portion of your sales effort funds standing still. That is survivable while growth is fast, but it becomes the binding constraint the moment acquisition slows, and it is the reason two companies with identical new sales can have completely different trajectories.
Most retention advice starts at the cancellation screen, which is far too late. These are the points in the lifecycle where the decision to leave is usually made.
Most cancellations are decided long before they happen. If a customer never reaches the moment where the product solves their problem, the subscription is already lost and the cancellation is just paperwork.
What helps: Define the single action that correlates with retention, then measure what share of new accounts reach it within seven days and treat that as an onboarding metric.
Some churn is created by marketing rather than product. Customers who were sold an outcome the product does not deliver will leave regardless of how good the experience is.
What helps: Look at churn broken down by acquisition channel. If one source churns far above the rest, the problem is targeting or messaging, not the product.
Usage usually fades weeks or months before a cancellation. By the time someone opens the billing page, the decision has already been made and discounts rarely reverse it.
What helps: Track a simple health signal such as weekly active seats or core actions per account, and trigger outreach when it drops rather than when someone cancels.
When only one person at a company uses the product, the account churns the moment that person changes role or leaves. This is one of the most common causes of unexplained enterprise churn.
What helps: Encourage multi seat adoption and shared workspaces so the product becomes part of how a team works rather than a personal preference.
A meaningful share of cancellations are not decisions at all. Expired cards and failed charges quietly end subscriptions that the customer intended to keep.
What helps: Add dunning with retries across several days, notify customers before the card expires, and make updating payment details possible without logging in.
Monthly billing gives customers twelve opportunities a year to reconsider. Every renewal is a small decision point, and the cumulative effect is significant.
What helps: Offer a genuine incentive for annual billing. It reduces the number of decision points and improves cash flow at the same time.
Retention work usually focuses on what happens after signup, but where customers come from shapes how long they stay. Traffic from broad paid campaigns converts people who are still deciding whether they have the problem at all. Customers who arrive through a trusted recommendation tend to understand the product before they sign up, activate faster, and churn less. Changing the mix of your acquisition channels is a retention lever, not just a growth one.
It depends entirely on who you sell to. For self serve products aimed at small businesses, monthly churn below 3 percent is strong and 5 to 7 percent is common. For mid market, anything above 2.5 percent deserves attention. For enterprise with annual contracts, monthly logo churn should usually sit below 1 percent. Comparing yourself to a single industry average is how teams end up either complacent or unnecessarily alarmed.
Customer churn counts accounts, revenue churn counts money. They diverge whenever your customers are not all the same size. If you mostly lose small accounts, revenue churn will be lower than customer churn. If you lose one large account in a quiet month, revenue churn can spike while customer churn barely moves. Healthy reporting tracks both.
Measure monthly if you bill monthly, since that is when customers actually make the decision. Annualise it for board reporting and comparison. Be careful with the conversion: multiplying monthly churn by twelve overstates the annual figure because the base shrinks each month. The correct approach compounds it, which is what this calculator does.
Because expansion revenue from existing customers can exceed what you lose to cancellations and downgrades. If customers add seats, move up tiers, or buy add-ons faster than others leave, your existing base produces more revenue this period than last. The best performing SaaS companies sustain net revenue retention between 110 and 130 percent.
No. Trial users who do not convert have not churned, they simply never became customers. Mixing them in inflates churn and hides what is happening with paying accounts. Track trial conversion as its own metric and keep churn limited to customers who were actually paying at the start of the period.
Annual contracts suppress monthly churn because customers cannot leave mid term, which can make retention look better than it is. The risk concentrates at renewal instead. If a significant share of your revenue is on annual terms, track renewal rate by cohort separately, otherwise you will be surprised when a renewal window arrives.
Reducing churn is almost always cheaper. Revenue you keep requires no acquisition spend, no sales cycle, and no onboarding. Retention also improves growth and margin simultaneously, which is why it moves metrics like the Rule of 40 faster than acquisition does. The simulator above shows what a given improvement is worth in your specific numbers.
Yes, deliberately. Setting new acquisition to zero isolates retention so you can see how much of your revenue base survives without help. Real trajectories will sit above these lines because you keep adding customers, but the gap between the two lines is the part attributable to retention alone.
Arkvon lets you run an affiliate program where partners recommend your product to audiences that already trust them. Those customers arrive better qualified, and your partners earn recurring commission for as long as the customer stays, so both sides are rewarded for retention.
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