Bootstrapped indie SaaS
200 paying customers on a single $29/month plan.
Monthly Recurring Revenue is the heartbeat of any subscription business. Enter your paying customers and ARPU - get MRR, ARR, and a 12-month projection that bakes in your growth and churn rates.
Most calculators stop at multiplication. This one shows where you land in 12 months and how you compare to ChartMogul’s 2026 benchmarks for your stage.
Benchmark verdicts use smb thresholds from ChartMogul Open Benchmarks 2025.
3 steps. Same formula every reputable SaaS dashboard uses: ChartMogul, Baremetrics, ProfitWell.
Average revenue per paying user per month. Use the actual amount billed monthly. For annual plans, divide the annual price by 12.
ARPUActive subscribers only. Exclude trials, free users, and accounts on a deferred-billing pause.
customers × ARPUFor multi-tier pricing, compute MRR per tier and add. Apply the same rule to one-off add-ons billed monthly.
Σ (n_i × p_i)Raw MRR values vary too much by ICP, pricing tier, and business model to compare across companies. Use MRR Growth Rate or NRR for comparison.
Three real scenarios. Inputs in plain English, the formula applied, the answer.
200 paying customers on a single $29/month plan.
120 customers on $49 plan, 80 on $99 plan. Blended ARPU = $69.
500 customers, $299 average ARPU.
Everything else worth knowing about Monthly Recurring Revenue.
MRR is a normalised monthly run-rate of your subscription revenue. Booked revenue is what GAAP recognises in a period. Annual contracts increase booked revenue immediately but only contribute 1/12 of contract value to MRR each month. Use MRR for momentum tracking and ARR for valuation conversations.
No. MRR by definition is recurring. Setup fees, professional-services revenue, and one-off add-ons are tracked separately. Including them inflates MRR and breaks comparability against industry benchmarks.
The formulas are textbook standard, used by ChartMogul, Baremetrics, OpenView, and most SaaS investors. Your numbers will be accurate to the inputs you provide. Garbage in, garbage out: pull the numbers from your billing system, not your gut.
MRR, ARR, ARPU: monthly. Churn, NRR: monthly with quarterly trend review. CAC, LTV, LTV:CAC, CAC payback: quarterly. They’re lagging and noisy on a monthly basis. Growth projection: refresh quarterly when you change your roadmap.
A 4% monthly churn rate is excellent for bootstrapped indie SaaS but alarming for enterprise SaaS. CAC payback of 18 months is dangerous for SMB but normal for enterprise. Stage-aware benchmarks tell you what good looks like at your size, not at someone else’s.
Yes, with adaptation. For usage-based pricing, normalise to monthly recurring billed amount before computing MRR. For hybrid (base + usage), include the recurring base in MRR and treat overage as expansion in NRR. The formulas don’t change. Only how you measure ARPU does.
Gross = before any offsetting moves. Net = after expansion or other positive flows offset losses. Gross churn ≤ net churn (net can be negative, meaning expansion outpaces loss). NRR includes expansion (net); GRR excludes it (gross). Both are reported in best SaaS dashboards.
No, never. Every metric here is paying-customers-only. Including trials inflates customer counts, deflates ARPU, and breaks comparability against industry benchmarks. Trials become "customers" the moment they convert to paid.
Investors care about: ARR (scale), MRR growth rate (momentum), monthly churn (retention), LTV:CAC (unit economics), and NRR if you have one. Seed: $0-100K ARR with strong growth. Series A: $1M+ ARR, sub-5% monthly churn, LTV:CAC 3x+. Series B: $5-15M ARR, NRR 110%+.
They’re a system. ARPU × customers = MRR. MRR × 12 = ARR. Customers × monthly churn = lost MRR. CAC + LTV + churn = unit economics. NRR + growth rate + churn = trajectory. Track them together. Improving one in isolation can mask trade-offs elsewhere.
Yes. Every tool on this page is free, no signup, no email gate, no upsell to a paid version. They’re built by FoundStep to help indie SaaS founders ship better businesses.
Benchmarks reference 2025-2026 data from ChartMogul Open Benchmarks, Baremetrics Open Benchmarks, OpenView SaaS Benchmarks 2024, and SaaS Capital’s annual report. Citations are linked under each benchmark table. We refresh annually.
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