What is churn?

Tools define the denominator differently. Stripe divides subscribers who churned in the past 30 days by the active subscribers 30 days ago plus new subscribers in the past 30 days. Both count subscriptions or subscribers, not revenue. Churned revenue is a separate number that adds contraction from downgrades.

Apple describes involuntary churn as customers who do not intend to leave but whose subscription fails to renew, usually for billing reasons, and says it is not related to customer satisfaction. You can cut it with a billing grace period, with the store's retry period, and with in-app messages that ask the customer to fix the payment method. Voluntary churn needs different tools: a retention offer in the Customer Center, a pause on Google Play, and win-back offers after the subscription ends.

Segment before you act. Monthly and annual plans have different rhythms, because an annual plan has one decision point a year and a monthly plan has twelve. A single blended rate hides which plan, store or country is leaking. RevenueDot divides subscriptions that lost access, net of billing recoveries, by the paid subscriptions active at the start of the period, so its rate can be negative in a period with many recoveries, and its Churn chart can be filtered and segmented by app, store, product, product duration, offering, country, platform and app version.

Example

A subscription app has 1,000 active subscribers on May 1. During May, 80 subscriptions end, and 20 of them are billing problems that recover after a retry. Net churned subscriptions are 60, so churn is 6% for the month.

Sources: Stripe Docs: Billing analytics definitions · Apple: Reducing involuntary subscriber churn · RevenueCat Docs: Charts