Free tool

Churn rate calculator

Customer churn and revenue churn side by side, the annualized figure, and the average customer lifetime each implies. No signup, nothing stored.

Customers
Revenue
Customer churn
3.0%
monthly
Revenue churn
1.9%
monthly
Annualized
31%
customers / year
Avg lifetime
33
months

Revenue churn is lower than customer churn, so you are losing your smaller accounts and keeping the bigger ones. That is the healthier direction.

The churn formula

Two churn rates, and the lifetime the customer one implies:

customer churn = customers lost / customers at start
revenue churn  = MRR lost / MRR at start
avg lifetime   = 1 / monthly customer churn

The reason to compute both is that a single churn number hides who is leaving. If revenue churn is lower than customer churn, you are shedding small accounts and keeping the valuable ones, which is survivable. If it is higher, your best customers are the ones walking, and that is a fire to put out now. Churn also feeds lifetime value directly, so reducing it is usually the highest-leverage growth work an early SaaS can do. Read the 12 SaaS metrics that matter and check your customer LTV.

Common questions

How do you calculate churn rate?

Divide the number lost during a period by the number you had at the start. Customer churn = customers lost / customers at start of month. Revenue churn = MRR lost / MRR at start of month. Multiply by 100 for a percentage.

What is the difference between customer churn and revenue churn?

Customer churn counts logos lost; revenue churn counts money lost. They diverge when your accounts are different sizes: lose small accounts and revenue churn is lower than customer churn, lose big ones and it is higher. Watching both tells you which customers you are losing.

What is a good churn rate for SaaS?

For SMB SaaS, roughly 3 to 5 percent monthly is common; for products serving larger companies, under 1 percent monthly is the target. Lower is always better, because churn compounds: 5 percent monthly is about 46 percent of your customers gone in a year.

How does churn affect customer lifetime?

Average customer lifetime in months is 1 divided by your monthly churn rate. At 3 percent monthly churn the average customer stays about 33 months; at 6 percent, about 17. Halving churn roughly doubles lifetime value.

Churn quietly moves your runway

Every cancellation lowers MRR, which raises net burn, which shortens runway. Plainhub keeps that chain live so a bad churn month shows up in your runway the same day.