Over the weekend I went down a rabbit hole trying to answer a simple question:
What is a “good” churn rate for SaaS?
I expected a clear answer.
Instead, I found:
- “<5% monthly churn is good”
- “5-7% is average”
- “>7% is bad”
But none of that really helps.
Because it ignores things like:
- stage (early vs growth vs scale)
- pricing model (monthly vs annual)
- industry
- customer type (B2B vs B2C)
A SaaS at $5k MRR behaves very differently to one at $1M ARR.
So I built a few simple tools
To make things more concrete, I built a set of free churn tools:
- churn rate calculator
- revenue lost to churn calculator
- SaaS LTV calculator
- SaaS churn benchmark tool
👉 https://saucecode.co/tools/churn
They’re intentionally simple - just enough to:
- calculate churn quickly
- start collecting anonymised data
The real idea isn’t the calculators
The tools are just the starting point.
What I actually want to build is a live dataset of SaaS churn benchmarks.
Instead of static blog posts saying:
“good churn is X%”
We could eventually answer things like:
- What’s average churn for SaaS under $10k MRR?
- How does churn differ between monthly and annual plans?
- What does churn look like by industry?
The problem with existing benchmarks
Most churn benchmarks today come from:
- annual reports
- limited datasets
- or broad surveys
Which leads to advice that’s either:
- outdated
- too general
- or not actionable
What I’ve noticed already
Even in early conversations and posts:
- smaller SaaS founders often don’t know if their churn is “normal”
- people focus on reducing churn, but not benchmarking it
- segmentation (billing, onboarding stage, etc.) matters a lot
Where this could go...
If enough people use the tools, this could turn into:
- real-time churn benchmarks
- segmented by company size / industry
- potentially even trends over time
Quick question for other founders to see what others think about this:
- Do you actually benchmark your churn today?
- And if so, what do you compare it against?
If you want to try it, it’s free, no signup required:
https://saucecode.co/tools/churn
Would love any feedback - still very early and figuring out if this is worth pushing further.