What the Calculator Calculates
Churn rate measures how many customers, or how much recurring revenue, a business loses over a period. Logo churn divides customers lost by the total customers at the start of the period. Revenue churn divides recurring revenue lost (including downgrades) by total recurring revenue. Net revenue churn goes further and subtracts expansion revenue from existing customers, so a company with strong upsells can show net negative churn and grow without adding a single new logo.
For subscription businesses, churn is the single most important leading indicator of durability. A company that cannot retain customers must spend ever more on acquisition just to stand still, growth becomes a treadmill instead of a compounding engine. Investors model churn before revenue, because revenue compounds only on top of a retained base.
How to Interpret the Results
Because large accounts matter more than small ones, revenue churn often differs sharply from logo churn. A startup can lose 8% of its customers yet only 3% of its revenue if departures are concentrated in small accounts. Read both numbers together, and always compare them on the same period: monthly rates compound, so a 5% monthly logo churn is roughly a 46% annual loss rate. Net revenue retention (NDR) above 100% means expansion revenue more than offsets losses, the signal investors want to see before a Series A.
Use Cases
- Benchmark your own SaaS: monthly logo churn under 5% and revenue churn under 2% are considered healthy for early-stage products.
- Evaluate a potential investment: persistent high churn means the growth you see is paid for, not compounding.
- Model retention scenarios: feed different churn assumptions into your LTV math and watch payback periods move.
- Track trends, not levels: a single churn reading is noise; a quarterly trend line tells you whether the product is getting stickier.
Churn and Early Deal Sourcing
Churn is hard to observe from the outside, but its drivers often show up in public engineering activity first. Teams that ship steadily, expand their contributor base, and keep repositories active tend to ship the fixes, features, and integrations that reduce churn. GitDealFlow tracks commit velocity, contributor growth, and repository expansion across 350+ startups, so you can see which teams are building their retention engine weeks before the retention numbers become public.
How to Use This Tool in a Deal Flow Workflow
This calculator exists to be embedded in a sourcing or diligence workflow, not used once and closed. The numbers it produces are the same primitives the GitDealFlow dataset is built on: 350+ startup GitHub organizations tracked across 15 sectors, refreshed weekly. When a target company is being evaluated, run its figures here, then compare against the sector baseline in the research dataset. The disciplined pattern is signal first (breakouts surface 21 to 47 days before the round), then arithmetic (does the unit economics justify a meeting), then process (memo, checklist, decision).
Related Tools
- GitHub momentum checker (any repo)
- All investor tools
- Due diligence checklists
- Research datasets (CC BY 4.0)
Frequently Asked Questions
What's a good churn rate?
Monthly: <5% logo churn, <2% revenue churn. Annual: <10%. Net negative churn (NDR >100%) is the goal.
What's the difference between customer churn and revenue churn?
Customer churn counts accounts lost; revenue churn counts recurring revenue lost. Investors model revenue churn because it directly drives ARR and valuation.
What is net negative churn?
When expansion revenue from existing customers exceeds lost revenue, net revenue retention exceeds 100% and the company grows without acquiring new customers.