FOR SAAS FOUNDERS AND OPERATORS
Enter starting MRR and the five things that moved it: new, expansion, reactivation, contraction, and churned MRR. The calculation runs privately in your browser. It does not connect to your billing system or upload anything.
All five movement fields are non-negative amounts -- enter contraction and churn as positive numbers you lost, not negative deltas.
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Gross revenue retention (GRR) answers one question only: of the MRR you started the month with, how much did you keep, counting only contraction and churn against it? It never counts new, expansion, or reactivation MRR, and it is capped at 100% because you cannot retain more of a base than you started with. Net revenue retention (NRR) adds expansion and reactivation back in and has no cap. On the default example, GRR is 90% (real churn and contraction) while NRR is 106% (expansion and reactivation more than covered it) -- both numbers are correct, and they answer different questions.
Because expansion and reactivation MRR are added to the base before comparing it to what you started with. When existing customers upgrade or come back for more than the contraction and churn removed, the surviving base is worth more than it was a month ago -- this is what SaaS operators mean by “negative churn.” It is a real, common, and desirable outcome. It does not mean nothing was lost; check gross revenue retention for that.
No. Both retention metrics measure what happened to the base of customers you already had at the start of the period. New MRR from brand-new customers is a separate line in the waterfall (and in ending MRR and the quick ratio), but it is never part of either retention percentage -- a period with excellent retention and zero new customers still reports the same GRR and NRR as one with the same retention and a wave of new signups.
Retention is about the existing base only. The quick ratio -- growth MRR (new plus expansion plus reactivation) divided by loss MRR (contraction plus churn) -- adds new customers back into the picture and asks a blunter question: for every dollar you lost, how many did you win? A ratio above 4 is generally considered strong, 1 means you are running in place, and below 1 means you are shrinking even after counting new business.
No. The calculator runs entirely in your browser. The six numbers you type in are never sent anywhere, and the optional usage counter records only which features were used and the day, never your MRR figures.