What is Churn Rate?
Turkish: Churn
Churn rate measures the share of customers or revenue lost in a period, showing retention health in subscription businesses.
What is Churn Rate?
Churn is the loss of customers in a subscription or recurring-revenue business. It is usually discussed as customer churn, but revenue churn should be measured separately because losing a large account is not the same as losing a small one.
A simple customer churn calculation is: customers lost during the period divided by customers at the beginning of the period. If a SaaS product starts the month with 500 customers and loses 25, the monthly customer churn rate is 5%.
Types of Churn
- Customer churn: Shows how many customers left.
- Revenue churn: Measures the share of monthly or annual revenue lost.
- Gross churn: Counts only lost revenue.
- Net churn: Offsets lost revenue with expansion revenue from existing customers.
- Involuntary churn: Happens because of card failures, billing errors, or payment issues.
Business Use
Churn is an early signal for product-market fit, onboarding quality, customer success, and pricing health. High churn can hide behind strong new sales; the business may appear to grow while its revenue base keeps leaking. That is why churn should be tracked together with MRR.
Root-cause analysis usually combines cancellation reasons, product usage data, support history, and NPS feedback. A customer leaving in the first 30 days requires a different response than a long-term customer leaving because of price or missing features.
In Barlas Dijital SaaS projects, churn dashboards are usually designed alongside activation, usage frequency, failed payments, and support interaction data.
Related Terms
ARR shows the annual recurring portion of subscription revenue, tracked in SaaS for growth, pricing, and forecasting decisions.
Customer SuccessCustomer success helps customers reach the outcome they bought the product for while managing churn risk and expansion opportunities.
DAU/MAU (Daily/Monthly Active Users)DAU/MAU compares daily active users with monthly active users to show how often people return and how sticky a product is.
LTV (Customer Lifetime Value)LTV estimates the total gross revenue a customer is expected to generate across their relationship with a product or business.
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue)MRR measures the recurring monthly portion of subscription revenue, showing how new sales, expansion, contraction, and churn affect SaaS growth.
NPS (Net Promoter Score)NPS is a loyalty survey that groups customers as promoters, passives, or detractors based on how likely they are to recommend a product.
User RetentionRetention measures how many users return after their first experience, showing whether a product creates lasting value and habit.