Active subscriptions movement: new, resubscribed and churned

The chart has three plotted measures and one total. New Actives counts subscriptions that became paid, other than resubscriptions and paid-to-paid product changes. A free trial counts on the day it converts to paid. Resubscription Actives counts paid subscriptions started by customers whose earlier subscription had ended. Churned Actives counts paid subscriptions that lost access, on the day the access ended, as a negative number. Movement is the sum, and it is in the table and the API.

Churned Actives is net of billing recoveries. If a renewal fails, access lapses, and the store later recovers the payment, the recovery cancels the churn it caused. A paid-to-paid product change, such as monthly to annual, counts in none of the three measures, because the customer was active before and after.

Everything is counted on the date it happened and in UTC. Sandbox purchases, granted access and Family Sharing purchases are excluded. Filter or segment by app, store, product, product duration, offering, country, platform and app version. Day is the default resolution, with week, month, quarter and year available.

Find it in the dashboard under Analytics > Charts, or call GET /v2/projects/{project_id}/charts/actives_movement. The response has the same shape as RevenueCat's Charts API.

Illustrative numbers for one week, starting with 2,000 active subscriptions.

Movement = 150 + 20 − 110 = +60, so the week ends with 2,060 active subscriptions. A customer who switched from monthly to annual is in none of the three rows.

Active Subscriptions shows the total. This chart shows what moved it. A flat total can hide a launch that brought in many new subscribers while an old cohort expired, and the bars show that at once.

Use it to tell acquisition problems from retention problems. If new actives fall, look at your paywall, trial and traffic. If churned actives rise, look at renewals, billing issues and cancellation reasons. If resubscriptions rise after a campaign, win-back is working.

How to read it

• Churned Actives is negative and plots below zero. The movement total is what is left after both sides.
• A subscription churns when access ends, not when the customer cancels, so a cancellation wave shows up one billing period later.
• A returning customer is a resubscription. They are not counted as new, even if they never used the app again in between.
• Compare week to week at week resolution. Daily bars are noisy for small apps.
• For the split of new subscriptions by trial, direct purchase and product change, read the Paid Subscriptions chart.