Mobile App
Churn Rate Calculator
Calculate monthly and annual churn rate, retention rate, and customer half-life. See how churn impacts revenue and growth.
๐ Your Metrics
๐ฐ Revenue Impact Optional
๐ Churn & Retention Results
How fast you're losing subscribers and how long they typically stay. These are your core health metrics.
Churn Rate
Churn Rate
Retention
Half-Life
On average, each subscriber stays about 20 months before cancelling.
๐ Retention Over Time
If you started with 1,000 subscribers today and churn stayed constant, here's how many you'd still have.
๐ธ Revenue Impact
The financial cost of those 50 lost subscribers โ recurring revenue you'll no longer receive, plus the money you already spent to acquire them.
๐ก A note on measuring churn: Calculating churn traditionally requires tracking individual users over time. With privacy-focused, session-based analytics, you measure aggregate engagement patterns insteadโlike session frequency trends and conversion ratesโwithout persistent user IDs.
๐ Where to Get Your Churn Numbers
Churn data comes from your billing or subscription platformโnot from analytics. Here are common sources developers use to gather the inputs for this calculator.
๐ณ Subscription Platforms
Tools like RevenueCat and Superwall track subscription lifecycle events directly from App Store and Google Play billing. They provide churn, retention, and MRR metrics out of the box.
๐ฆ Payment Processors
Stripe Billing, Paddle, and similar processors track failed payments, cancellations, and subscription status changes. Your billing dashboard gives you the subscriber counts needed for this calculator.
๐ App Store Analytics
App Store Connect and Google Play Console provide subscription retention reports natively. These first-party dashboards give you churn data without any third-party SDK.
๐ก๏ธ Privacy perspective: Subscription churn data comes from billing relationshipsโnot from behavioral tracking. This means you can understand churn without adding invasive user-level analytics to your app. Pair billing churn data with session-based engagement analytics to understand how people use your app without tracking who they are.
๐ Churn Formulas Explained
Churn Rate
Percentage of subscribers who left during the period. The most fundamental retention metric.
Annual Churn (from Monthly)
Compounded annual churn. Note: 5% monthly โ 60% annual. It's actually ~46% due to compounding on a shrinking base.
Customer Half-Life
How many periods until half your subscribers are gone. Gives an intuitive feel for retention velocity.
๐ Churn Rate Benchmarks by App Category
| App Category | Monthly Churn | Annual Churn |
|---|---|---|
| ๐ผ SaaS Companion | 2โ5% | 22โ46% |
| ๐ E-commerce | 3โ6% | 31โ53% |
| ๐ฎ Gaming | 4โ8% | 39โ63% |
| ๐ฑ Subscription Apps | 5โ10% | 46โ72% |
| ๐ฅ Health & Fitness | 6โ12% | 53โ79% |
Benchmarks are approximate industry averages. Your results will vary based on app quality, market, pricing, and onboarding experience.
โ Frequently Asked Questions
How do you calculate churn rate?
Divide the number of subscribers lost during a period by the number at the start, then multiply by 100. If you started with 1,000 subscribers and lost 50, your monthly churn rate is 5%.
What is a good churn rate for mobile apps?
It depends on your category. SaaS companion apps typically see 2โ5% monthly churn, while subscription consumer apps see 5โ10%. A monthly churn rate under 5% is generally considered healthy.
What's the difference between churn and retention?
They're inverse metrics. Retention Rate = 100% - Churn Rate. If your monthly churn is 5%, your monthly retention is 95%. Both measure the same phenomenon from different angles.
How do I convert monthly churn to annual churn?
Don't multiply by 12โthat overstates it. Use: Annual Churn = 1 - (1 - Monthly Churn)^12. For example, 5% monthly churn compounds to ~46% annually, not 60%.
Can I measure churn without tracking individual users?
Traditional churn requires persistent user IDs. However, subscription platforms like RevenueCat and Superwall provide churn metrics from billing data. Pair this with session-based analytics to understand engagement patterns without invasive tracking.
What is customer half-life?
The time it takes for half your subscribers to churn. With 5% monthly churn, your half-life is ~13.5 months. It gives a more intuitive sense of how quickly your user base erodes than a raw percentage.
๐งฐ Related Free Tools
LTV Calculator
Pair your churn rate with ARPU to calculate customer lifetime value and LTV:CAC ratio.
A/B Test Calculator
Calculate sample sizes and test duration for experiments aimed at reducing churn.
Metrics Builder
Build a custom analytics plan for your app โ see which metrics matter for your category and privacy posture.
Peace of Mind With Defensible Analytics
Churn data comes from your billing platform. But understanding why people disengage? That's where session-based analytics comes in. Respectlytics gives you automated conversion intelligenceโsession trends, funnel analysis, and engagement patternsโwithout collecting personal data.
Transparent about what's collected. Defensible by design. Five fields stored, nothing more.