Churn Chart
This page describes Charts v3.
This chart is also available in our legacy Charts v2. See Charts v2 and v3 differences. Specifically, you might notice different churn numbers on the App Store in v3 in comparison to v2.
Churn measures the percentage of active subscriptions that were lost during a given period.
Available settings​
- Filters: Yes
- Segments: Yes
Cohorting​
Since churn rate is measured as a portion of all active subscriptions, it specifically does not measure the churn/retention rates of specific customer cohorts. To answer those questions, check out our Subscription Retention chart and our Cohort Explorer.
How to use Churn in your business​
A stable or declining churn rate indicates a healthy, growing business; and should be monitored like a health metric for that reason. However, keep in mind that churn can be relatively high for mobile apps when compared to web SaaS products.
Use the Active Subscriptions Movement chart to monitor if new paying subscribers is growing faster than churning subscribers over a given period, and consider segmenting the Churn chart by key dimensions like country or product duration to understand which subscriber segments have the lowest churn (and therefore that you may have the strongest product market fit with).
Calculation​
For each period we measure:
- Actives: The count of paid, active (unexpired) subscriptions at the beginning of the period.
- Churned Actives: Total decrease in active subscriptions caused by paid subscriptions expiring in that period. Any subscriptions that had lost access due to a billing issue (ie. they had no grace period or the grace period had lapsed) and later recover, as well as subscriptions resuming after a pause are counted as negative churn in the period in which they recover.
Formula​
([Churned Actives] / [Actives]) * 100 = Churn Rate
FAQs​
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Is a cancelled subscription (e.g. a subscriber that has disabled auto-renewal) considered churned? | No, a cancelled subscription is not considered churned until their subscription has expired. |
| Can Churn be negative for a period? | Yes, if there were more recoveries from billing issues and subscriptions resuming after a pause than there were expiring subscriptions, then churn for that period would be negative. This means that even without adding any new actives, your active subscriber base would’ve grown in this period. |
| Can Churn be greater than 100% for a period? | Yes. The "Actives" row contains the number of subscriptions active at the beginning of the period, and the "Churned Actives" row the number of subscriptions churned during the period. Any subscriptions that first became active within the period and then churned are not considered in the "Actives" row for that period. For example, if you look at churn on a monthly basis, a weekly subscription that was started and expired within a given month shows up as "Churned Actives" but not as "Actives" for that month. This can result in Churn numbers greater than 100%. To understand these numbers, look at the chart with smaller periods, e.g., by switching from Monthly to Weekly or Daily. |
| Why does the Actives count for a given period not match the Active Subscriptions count for the same period? | Actives in the Churn chart is a count of the number of active subscriptions at the start of each period, while Active Subscriptions counts the number of active subscriptions at the end of each period. This is so that Churn can be expressed as a portion of an unchanging value over a given period (starting active subscriptions), while Active Subscription can show the end result of the change over that period (ending active subscriptions) driven by new and churned active subscriptions. |