Basic Churn & Retention Calculator
Calculate churn rate, retention rate, and net growth from your customer counts. Understand how many customers you're losing, keeping, and gaining each period.
Quickly Estimate Your Churn and Retention
Enter your starting and ending customers for a period, plus any new signups or losses, to see simple churn and retention metrics. Compare against previous periods to track your customer growth.
Understanding Churn and Retention
What is Churn?
Churn refers to the loss of customers over a given time period. When customers cancel their subscription, stop purchasing, or become inactive, they are said to have "churned." The churn rate measures this loss as a percentage of your starting customer base. For example, if you started with 1,000 customers and lost 50, your churn rate would be 5%.
What is Retention?
Retention is the flip side of churn—it measures how many customers you keep over time. The retention rate in this calculator is calculated as your ending customer count divided by your starting count. Note that if you add new customers and grow your base, retention can exceed 100%, which simply indicates net growth rather than keeping more than you had.
How Churn and Retention Relate to Growth
Your customer base changes through two forces: acquisition (new customers) and churn (lost customers). Net growth is the balance between these:
Even with high acquisition, high churn can prevent growth. For subscription and SaaS businesses, reducing churn often has a bigger impact on long-term value than increasing acquisition, since retained customers contribute recurring revenue.
Why Period-Based Churn is Only a Rough Approximation
This calculator uses a simple period-level calculation that has limitations:
- •No cohort tracking: It treats all customers the same, regardless of when they joined. New customers and long-time customers may have very different churn behaviors.
- •Timing issues: If you acquire many customers late in the period, they haven't had time to churn yet, making churn look artificially low.
- •Seasonality: Single-period calculations don't account for seasonal patterns in customer behavior.
- •No lifetime value insight: Period-level churn doesn't tell you how long customers stay or their total value.
When You Might Need More Advanced Models
Consider more sophisticated churn analysis when:
- ✓Cohort analysis: You want to track how specific groups of customers (e.g., January signups) retain over time.
- ✓Survival analysis: You need to model the probability of customers churning at different tenure lengths.
- ✓Revenue churn: Lost revenue matters more than lost customer count (e.g., losing high-value vs low-value customers).
- ✓Predictive modeling: You want to identify at-risk customers before they churn.
Important Disclaimer
This calculator is for educational purposes only. Churn benchmarks vary widely by industry, business model, customer segment, and company stage. There is no universal "good" or "bad" churn rate. This tool does not provide financial, investment, or business advice. Always consult with qualified professionals for important business decisions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Churn rate measures the percentage of customers you lose over a given period. It's calculated as: Lost Customers / Starting Customers. For example, if you started with 1,000 customers and lost 50, your churn rate is 5%. This metric helps you understand customer attrition and its impact on your business.
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