How it works
How to calculate churn rate
Enter your starting count
How many customers or subscribers did you have at the start of the period? Pick a timeframe -- monthly or quarterly both work.
Enter customers lost
How many cancelled, did not renew, or stopped buying during that same period? Do not count new customers you gained -- this is only about losses.
See your churn and retention rate
Churn rate shows the percentage you lost. Retention rate shows the percentage you kept. Together they tell you how healthy your customer base is.
How to reduce churn
Most churn is fixable once you figure out why people leave.
Fix onboarding first
Most churn happens in the first 30 days. If customers do not see value quickly, they leave. A better welcome email sequence, a setup guide, or a quick-start video can cut early churn significantly.
Spot at-risk customers early
Customers who stop logging in, stop opening emails, or reduce usage are about to churn. Reach out before they cancel, not after.
Collect and act on feedback
Ask churned customers why they left. Ask current customers what is frustrating. The answers are usually specific and fixable -- and they tell you where to focus.
Use reviews to build commitment
Customers who leave a review are psychologically more invested in your product. Asking for a review at the right moment creates a small commitment that makes cancellation less likely.
Offer annual plans
Monthly subscribers churn at much higher rates than annual ones. If you offer a discount for annual billing, you lock in revenue and give customers less frequent decision points about whether to stay.
Do not ignore involuntary churn
Failed credit card payments cause churn too. Dunning emails -- automated reminders to update payment info -- can recover 20-40% of failed payments that would otherwise become cancellations.
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Questions, answered
The percentage of customers who leave during a given period. If you started the month with 1,000 customers and lost 47, your churn rate is 4.7%. It is the most direct measure of whether your customers are sticking around.
Customers lost divided by customers at the start of the period, times 100. So 47 lost out of 1,000 starting is (47 / 1,000) x 100 = 4.7% churn.
Depends on your business. SaaS companies serving small businesses often see 3-5% monthly churn. Enterprise SaaS targets under 1%. Ecommerce subscriptions are all over the place. The best benchmark is your own number from last quarter.
They are inverses. 4.7% churn means 95.3% retention. Same information, different framing. Use churn when diagnosing problems, retention when reporting progress.
No. Customer churn counts people. Revenue churn counts dollars. You could lose 10 customers on your $9 plan (low revenue churn) or 2 customers on your $500 plan (high revenue churn). Track both if you have multiple pricing tiers.
Because you lose a percentage of your base each period. 5% monthly churn means after 12 months you have lost about 46% of the customers you started with, not 60%. It is exponential decay. Even small churn rates get expensive over time.
Poor onboarding and lack of perceived value in the first 30 days. Most customers who churn decided to leave long before they actually cancelled. If they never saw why your product matters, they were always going to leave.
Customer churn rate cannot be negative -- you cannot un-lose a customer. But net revenue churn can be negative if upgrades and expansion from existing customers exceed the revenue lost to cancellations. That is the best situation to be in.
Keep customers longer with real reviews
Customers who engage with reviews stay longer. WiserReview collects feedback that builds loyalty and gives you signals before people leave.
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