Churn Rate

Churn rate is the inverse of retention. It measures how many customers leave over a specific time window -- monthly, quarterly, or annually. Reducing churn is one of the highest-leverage growth activities because retained users compound revenue.

There are two flavors: customer churn (accounts lost) and revenue churn (MRR lost). Revenue churn can be negative if expansion revenue from existing customers exceeds losses, a hallmark of healthy SaaS businesses.

Analyzing churn cohorts helps identify whether the problem is onboarding (early churn), feature gaps (mid-lifecycle churn), or competitive pressure (late-stage churn). Each root cause requires a different intervention.