What is churn rate?
Churn rate is the percentage of users, or subscribers, who stop using or paying for a product over a given period. For a subscription app it is one of the most watched health metrics, because losing existing customers offsets new ones and limits how fast the business can grow.
How churn rate is calculated
The basic formula divides customers lost during a period by the number you had at the start of that period. If you began the month with 1,000 subscribers and 50 canceled, monthly churn is 5 percent. There are a few variants worth separating. User churn counts people who leave, while revenue churn counts dollars lost, which can differ when higher-paying users cancel at a different rate. Gross revenue churn ignores any offsetting upgrades, while net revenue churn subtracts expansion from existing customers and can even be negative if upgrades outweigh cancellations. Picking one definition and tracking it consistently is what makes the number useful.
Why churn rate matters
Churn compounds. A 5 percent monthly churn means losing a large share of a cohort over a year, so even strong signups can struggle to outrun it. Because retained users keep paying, churn is the main lever behind lifetime value: lower churn means users stay longer and are worth more. It also reveals product health, since a spike often points to a pricing change, a bug, a missing feature, or weak onboarding. Watching churn by cohort and by plan shows not just that users are leaving, but which ones and when.
Reducing and tracking churn, with AppFlight
Common ways to reduce churn include better onboarding, reminding users of value before renewal, and handling failed payments, since some churn is involuntary when a card fails rather than a deliberate cancel. AppFlight builds native Swift and SwiftUI apps and includes a command center for analytics and revenue, and when an app uses an integration like RevenueCat, churn and retention metrics can surface there. Note that Apple billing retry and grace periods affect exactly when a lapsed subscription counts as churned.
FAQ
How is churn rate calculated?
Divide the number of customers lost in a period by the number you had at the start of that period. If you began the month with 1,000 subscribers and 50 canceled, monthly churn is 5 percent. Revenue churn measures lost revenue rather than lost users.
What is a good churn rate for an app?
It varies by category and price, so there is no single number. Lower is better, and what matters most is the trend over time and how churn compares to your new signups. Even modest monthly churn compounds significantly over a year.
What is the difference between churn and retention?
They are two sides of the same number. Retention is the share of users who stay; churn is the share who leave. If monthly retention is 95 percent, monthly churn is 5 percent.