DAU/MAU (Stickiness Ratio)
The share of monthly active users who show up daily — how to read stickiness, and what counts as good for SaaS.
What is it?
DAU/MAU divides daily active users by monthly active users, giving the share of your monthly audience that shows up on a typical day. A 29% ratio means the average monthly user is present roughly nine days a month. It is the standard proxy for habit: retention metrics say whether users come back eventually, stickiness says whether the product is part of their routine.
For subscription businesses it is a leading indicator with teeth — usage frequency decays quarters before the subscription cancels, and an account whose stickiness is falling is an account drafting its churn email.
How to calculate?
Divide DAU by MAU using the same definition of active for both — a real product action, not an open or a background sync. Average the daily ratio across a month rather than cherry-picking a day, and expect weekday-weekend seasonality in B2B: a workday-only tool structurally caps near 5/7ths, about 71%, before any engagement problem exists.
The definition of active is where this metric is won or lost. Counting logins makes everyone sticky; counting the action your retention actually correlates with makes the number mean something.
What is a good DAU/MAU?
For B2B SaaS, 20% is solid, 30–40% is strong, and above 50% is rarefied territory shared with communication tools and consumer social apps. Daily-workflow products — chat, docs, dev tools — should aim high; a monthly-cadence product like invoicing or board reporting will structurally sit near 10% while retaining perfectly.
Which is the real lesson: benchmark against your product's natural cadence, not against Slack. A stickiness ratio that is stable-to-rising at your cadence is healthy; chasing a daily habit in a monthly-value product mostly generates notification spam and vanity DAU.