Subscription retention rate: how to calculate and read it

RevenueDot cohorts paid subscriptions by their first paid date. A subscription that starts with a free trial goes into the cohort of the day it converts. The table has one row per cohort (month by default) and a column for each paid period. The first column is the cohort size. Period 0 is the first paid period, and period k is the paid period after k renewals. A subscription reaches period k when it has k + 1 paid periods.

Each cell divides by the subscriptions that have had time to reach that period, so a cohort that is too young for a period does not drag the number down. RevenueDot works out when a period would start from the product's duration, or from the length of the first paid period when no duration is known. A cell is marked incomplete while only part of the cohort has had time, and it is blank when none has. The table shows up to 24 periods.

This chart follows subscriptions, not customers. A customer who lets a subscription lapse and later comes back starts a new subscription, which goes into a newer cohort. Sandbox purchases, granted access and Family Sharing purchases are excluded. The retention_scale selector shows relative (percent) or absolute (count). You can filter by app, store, product, product duration, offering, country, platform and app version, but not segment.

Find it in the dashboard under Analytics > Charts, or call GET /v2/projects/{project_id}/charts/subscription_retention. The response is a cohort table in the same shape as RevenueCat's Charts API: each value has cohort, period, value and incomplete, and periods[0] is the cohort size.

Illustrative numbers for one monthly cohort of 200 subscriptions that started in January.

Of the 200 subscriptions in the January cohort, 98 reached their fourth paid month, so retention at period 3 is 98 ÷ 200 = 49%.

Retention tells you how long a subscriber stays, which sets what a subscriber is worth. A table where each column drops slowly and then flattens describes a product people keep. A table where the second column falls steeply describes a product people try once.

Compare cohorts down a column to see whether a change helped. If the cohort after a new onboarding or price keeps more subscribers at period 3 than the cohort before it, the change worked. Compare plans of the same duration, and use the Churn chart for a single rate per period.

How to read it

• Read across a row for one cohort's life, and down a column to compare cohorts at the same age.
• Period 1 is the first renewal. For an annual plan that is a year after purchase, so filter by product duration before you compare plans.
• The newest cells are incomplete. Do not read a young cohort's last cell as a drop.
• The chart counts subscriptions. A customer who returns after a gap appears again in a newer cohort.
• Use the absolute scale when a cohort is small. A percentage of 10 subscriptions moves in steps of 10 points.