Cohort: Customer Retention
This report is called Paid Subscriber Retention for accounts with free subscription support. Learn more.
The Customer Retention cohort report shows you what percentage of customers still have an active subscription at each interval after their first subscription starts.
For SaaS businesses, it's one of the clearest indicators of long-term health — showing you not just how many customers churn, but exactly when in the customer lifecycle that churn tends to occur.
If this is your first time working with cohorts, read our guide on how a Cohort Analysis works in ChartMogul.
Use this report to spot the moments in the customer lifecycle — from sign-up to cancellation — where churn is most likely. You can also see how long, on average, customers stay with your business.
What is a good customer retention rate?
To grow your SaaS business, a customer retention rate as close to 100% as possible is ideal — that means nearly all customers keep renewing and you hold on to your subscription revenue. Even a 5% monthly churn rate wipes out almost half (46%) of a cohort in a year. Learn more in our SaaS Retention Report.
Companies with retention rates higher than 85% grow 1.5–3× faster. Use Benchmarks to compare your retention rate to industry peers.
Report Notes
- Customers who begin their first subscription in the same interval are grouped in the same cohort.
- There are five intervals available for analysis: day, week, month, quarter and year.
- ChartMogul classifies customers who have an active subscription or have reactivated a subscription (they previously canceled) as Active and customers who have canceled all their subscriptions as Cancelled. Learn more about customer and subscription statuses.
How ChartMogul Calculates Customer Retention Rate
- ChartMogul counts a customer as retained as long as they stay Active.
- A customer becomes Cancelled when they cancel all their subscriptions — this lowers the cohort's Customer Retention Rate.
- Reactivating a canceled subscription moves them back to Active and improves the rate.
How to Read the Cohort Table
Cohort Value is the total number of customers in a cohort — that is, all customers whose first subscription started in the same time interval (day, week, month, quarter, or year).
Each table cell shows one of two metrics — choose which one using the Show drop-down:
- Rate % — the percentage change in the cohort's Customer Retention Rate relative to the previous interval or the starting interval.
- Customers — the raw number of active customers remaining in the cohort.
Select any cell with a value that has changed from the previous interval to view the MRR movements for that interval.
You can also visualize cohorts as cohort curves.
Next Steps
- Learn more about our other cohort analyses.
- See the estimated revenue you’ll receive from a customer with Customer Lifetime Value.
- See the rate of customers your business is losing with Customer Churn Rate.