Metrics
Deep dives on the SaaS metrics that matter — definitions, formulas and how to act on them.
Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
The single number investors care most about — whether your existing customers grow on their own, even before a single new logo.
Expansion MRR
Measure upsells, cross-sells and add-ons in a way that ties directly to net dollar retention.
Contraction MRR
The revenue you lose when customers downgrade instead of leaving — and why it is an early warning for churn.
New MRR
The recurring revenue from first-time customers — the cleanest read on whether acquisition is working.
Churn MRR
The recurring revenue you lose when customers cancel outright — the single biggest threat to growth.
Reactivation MRR
The recurring revenue from customers who cancelled and came back — a good sign, but never the main growth engine.
MRR Movements
The five forces behind every change in recurring revenue — and how they bridge starting MRR to ending MRR.
Gross Revenue Retention (GRR)
Your revenue floor — how much of the existing base survives churn and contraction, before any expansion.
Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR)
The predictable subscription revenue that repeats every month — the number every other SaaS metric is built on.
Net New Revenue
The bottom line of your MRR movements — how much recurring revenue you actually added or lost this period.
MRR Growth Rate
The percentage change in recurring revenue period over period — the number investors instinctively annualise.
Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR)
Your recurring revenue at annual scale — the same book as MRR, in the unit boards and investors think in.
Paying Accounts
The count of customers actually paying you — the simplest measure of how big your base really is.
Paying Customers Movements
The MRR movements counted in customers instead of dollars — how widespread each change really is.
Average Sales Price (ASP)
The typical New MRR a new customer brings — and the clearest read on whether you're moving up-market.
Average Expansion Amount
The typical size of an upgrade — whether your expansion comes from many small bumps or a few big ones.
Average Contraction Amount
The typical size of a downgrade — whether customers are trimming a little or cutting deep.
Average Churn Amount
The typical size of a cancellation — not how many customers you lost, but how big they were.
Average Reactivation Amount
The typical MRR a returning customer comes back on — often different from what they left on.
Customers Retention Rate
The flip side of churn — and why a reassuringly high monthly rate still compounds into big annual losses.
Realized Customer Lifetime Value
The revenue a customer has actually paid — the factual counterpart to projected cLTV.
Average Account Lifespan
How long a paying account is expected to last — churn rate translated into a time horizon.
Average Company Lifespan
The company-level counterpart to account lifespan — why organisations outlast individual seats.
Win-back Rate
The share of churned customers who come back — how permanent your churn really is.
Median Time to Return
How long the typical churned customer takes to come back — the shape of your win-back opportunity.
Trial-to-Paid Conversion Rate
The share of trials that become paying customers — the sharpest read on whether your trial proves its value.
Expansion Rate
How many of your existing customers are growing — the breadth of expansion, not just the dollars.
Signups
The top of the funnel — a denominator for every rate below it, and a vanity number on its own.
Trials Started
A stronger intent signal than a raw signup — the bridge between the funnel top and paying customers.
Time to Activated
How fast a new signup reaches first value — and why speed to the aha moment decides everything after it.
Time to Engaged
Signup to the second value milestone — where trying the product turns into relying on it.
Growth Quick Ratio
The dollars you gain for every dollar you lose — your whole MRR bridge compressed into one number.
Gross Churn Coverage
How many times new MRR covers the revenue you lost to churn — is fresh business outrunning cancellations?
Expansion to Contraction MRR Ratio
Upsell dollars against downgrade dollars — whether your existing base is trading up or down.
Expansion to Contraction Count Ratio
The same trade-up story by customer count — how widespread up-tiering is, independent of deal size.
Growth Efficiency Index
How much of every dollar you win actually survives as net growth after churn and contraction.
Gross-to-Net Spread
The gap between NRR and GRR — exactly how much expansion is doing to lift your retention.
Average Revenue Per Account (ARPA)
The typical monthly value of a customer — a building block for lifetime value, and a mix-shift trap.
Average Revenue Per User (ARPU)
The value of a seat rather than a customer — the sharper lens for seat-based and product-led businesses.
Active Accounts
Accounts still showing up in the product — the usage signal that leads paying-account churn.
Engaged Accounts
The deeply-engaged core of your base — the accounts most likely to renew and expand.
New Paying Accounts
The logos behind your New MRR — how many customers, not just how many dollars.
Churned Paying Accounts
The logos behind your Churn MRR — the direct offset to new paying accounts.
Churn Acceleration
The second derivative of churn — whether your churn rate is quietly speeding up before the level alarms anyone.
Logo vs Dollar Churn Gap
In one number, whether the customers you lose are bigger or smaller than your average.
Contraction Before Cancellation
The death spiral in numbers — accounts that trim their plan, then cancel entirely soon after.
Average Active Users Per Account
The stickiness metric hiding in plain sight — why multiplayer accounts retain and expand far better.
Single-Active-User MRR Share
The slice of revenue riding on one person — MRR that is a single departure away from churning.
Single-Active-User Account Count
How many of your accounts are a single point of failure — the backlog for multi-user conversion.
Paying Dormant Accounts
Billed today, gone tomorrow — customers who still pay but have quietly stopped using the product.
Zombie Revenue
The most fragile MRR you have — real today, attached to customers who have stopped using the product.
Annualized Growth Rate
Your latest monthly growth compounded across a year — the pace investors actually benchmark.
Smoothed MRR Growth Rate (L3M)
Growth with the noise removed — a three-month average that shows the trend, not the wobble.
Months to Double
At the current rate, how long until MRR doubles — momentum as a timeline anyone can grasp.
Growth Acceleration
The change in the growth rate itself — where a stalling business shows its hand first.
Growth Volatility
How much your growth rate bounces around — predictability, which markets reward on its own.
Expansion Velocity
How quickly new customers expand — fast up-tiering is product-market fit you can see in weeks.
Contraction Velocity
How quickly new customers shrink or leave — the early-warning mirror of expansion velocity.
Reactivation Share of Gross Adds
How much of your new revenue is really returning customers — good news that can hide a churn problem.
Annual Share
The portion of MRR on annual contracts — the quietest lever on how durable your revenue is.
Expansion Saturation
The share of customers who have already expanded — a gauge of how much up-tier runway is left.
Durable MRR
The revenue still standing a year from now at today's churn — the conservative floor beneath your MRR.
Refund Rate
The share of billed revenue you hand back — a direct measure of post-sale friction.
Dispute Rate
Chargebacks as a share of billings — one of the few metrics with a hard operational ceiling.
MRR Discount Amount
The revenue you chose not to collect — the mirror image of MRR, and just as worth measuring.
Discount Value
The up-front discount used to win new customers — acquisition spend hiding inside your pricing.
Discounted First Payment Rate
How often you need a discount to close — price doing work your value proposition should.
Discounted New Accounts
How many new customers were won with a price concession — the scale of discount-dependent acquisition.
Discounted New Companies
The company-level view of discount-driven acquisition — fewer, larger, more negotiated.
Average New Accounts Discount Size
How deep your concessions run per deal — not just how often you make them.
Average New Companies Discount Size
The typical discount per enterprise deal — how much of each company win is bought with price.
NRR Cohort
Net revenue retention by acquisition cohort — how each intake of customers holds up as it ages.
Conversion Rate
Why signup-to-paid conversion is meaningless without cohort context — and the definition we recommend.
Customer Lifetime Value (cLTV)
The true value of a customer relationship and why most SaaS teams overstate it.
Customer Churn Rate
The difference between logo churn and revenue churn — and why the headline number rarely tells the full story.
Activation rate
Why the percentage of users who reach value matters more than total signups.