Churn rate calculator

How churn rate is worked out

Churn rate is the share of the customers you had at the start of a month who cancelled during that month. Divide the customers who cancelled by the customers you started with, then multiply by 100. (What churn means, and the kinds there are, is in what is churn.)

If you started October with 200 paying customers and 9 of them cancelled during October, your churn rate for October is 9 ÷ 200, which is 4.5%.

Customers who signed up during the month are left out of both numbers. Counting them would let a good month of sign-ups hide the people who left, and the number is meant to show how well you keep the customers you already have.

Monthly churn adds up over a year

A monthly churn rate looks small, but it compounds. At 4.5% a month, about 42% of the customers you had in January are gone by the following January, because each month you lose 4.5% of whoever is still there.

The calculator shows that yearly figure, assuming every month churns at the same rate. It also shows how long a customer stays with you on average, which is one month divided by the monthly churn rate. At 4.5% that is about 22 months.

Customer churn and revenue churn

Customer churn counts people. Revenue churn counts money: the monthly recurring revenue you lost to cancellations and downgrades during the month, divided by the monthly recurring revenue you had at its start.

The two can tell different stories. If the customers who leave are mostly on your cheapest plan, revenue churn will be lower than customer churn. If a few large customers leave, it will be higher. Open "Revenue churn too" in the calculator to see both.

What to count as a cancellation

• Count a customer in the month their paid plan actually ends, not the day they click cancel.
• A card that fails and is never fixed is churn too. It is often called involuntary churn, and it is usually the easiest kind to win back.
• A free trial that ends without paying is not churn, because that person was never a paying customer. It belongs in your trial conversion rate instead.
• Pauses are worth tracking on their own, so they don't blur the number either way.

How to lower it

In a small SaaS, a lot of churn happens at a few moments you can see coming: a card that fails, a customer who stops logging in, a trial that ends before the product was really used. A short, personal email at each of those moments, sent while there is still time, can catch people before they decide to leave.

These guides cover what to send at each one: the failed payment email, re-engagement emails for people who went quiet, the trial ending email, and win-back emails for people who already left.

Kicklace sends these emails for you, written from what each customer actually did in your product and in your own voice. You can try it in the demo with no sign-up.

FAQ

What is a good churn rate?

It depends a lot on who you sell to and what you charge, so a single target number is not very useful. Compare your own months with each other: a churn rate that is falling month after month matters more than how it compares with anyone else's.

Is churn rate the same as retention rate?

They are two sides of the same thing. Retention rate is the share of the customers you started with who are still there at the end, with new customers left out. Over the same period, customer churn and customer retention add up to 100%. The customer retention rate calculator works it out the other way around.

Should downgrades count as churn?

Not in customer churn, because the customer is still with you. They do count in revenue churn, since you lost part of what they paid.