MRR Growth Projector Calculator

Monthly recurring revenue is the heartbeat metric of any subscription business — and a forecast turns it from a rear-view mirror into a planning tool. When you can see where MRR is heading under realistic assumptions, you can answer the questions that actually run a company: how many salespeople can we afford to hire, when do we hit cash-flow positive, and how much runway does the current burn leave us?

Forecasting also forces honesty about the growth equation. Founders love to project 15% monthly growth forever; the maths of compounding makes that look spectacular on a spreadsheet. But the moment you separate growth from churn — the two numbers this calculator takes as inputs — the real picture appears. A company 'growing 15%' with 10% monthly churn is a hamster wheel: massive sales effort for 5% net progress.

Investors think in these terms too. When you pitch, nobody is impressed by a revenue number alone — they want the trajectory, the retention, and the unit economics behind it. A clean MRR projection with defensible inputs signals that you understand your own business mechanics, which is often the difference between a funded round and a polite pass.

1. 1
   Enter current MRR

   Your monthly recurring revenue right now.

2. 2
   Set growth and churn

   Gross monthly growth % and monthly revenue churn %.

3. 3
   Pick the horizon

   How many months ahead to project (1–60).

4. 4
   Read the forecast

   Projected MRR, ARR, average net new MRR, and the growth curve.

A forecast is only as good as its inputs, and the growth input is where most projections go wrong. Never use your best month. Pull the last 3–6 months of new + expansion MRR, divide each by that month's starting MRR, and average them. That trailing average is your honest growth rate — it smooths the spikes from a big launch or a lucky enterprise deal.

Churn deserves the same rigour. Revenue churn (not logo churn) is what matters for an MRR projection: the percentage of starting MRR lost to cancellations and downgrades each month. If you only track logo churn, convert it — losing 5% of small customers is very different from losing 5% of revenue. Enterprise SaaS often runs 0.5–2% monthly revenue churn; SMB SaaS typically sees 3–7%.

One more refinement: separate seasonal effects. If your product sells heavily in Q4 and stalls in summer, a single annual average will mislead month-to-month planning. For seasonal businesses, project quarter by quarter with quarter-specific rates, or at least sanity-check the monthly curve against last year's shape.

Typical monthly benchmarks by segment (SaaS)

These are directional benchmarks, not targets — use your own trailing data first. But they are useful for stress-testing: run your projection with your current numbers, then with the benchmark low end, and see how far apart the outcomes are. If a 2-point churn difference halves your 12-month projection, churn deserves your attention more than growth.

Gross churn measures revenue lost. Net churn measures revenue lost minus revenue expanded from existing customers. The distinction compounds dramatically: a company with 5% gross churn but 4% monthly expansion has just 1% net churn — and its projection looks like a company with far better retention than its cancellation numbers suggest.

Negative net churn — where existing customers grow their spend faster than you lose revenue — is the single most powerful dynamic in SaaS. At −2% monthly net churn, your installed base grows ~27% per year even if you never sign another customer. This is why expansion (upsells, seat additions, usage growth) deserves as much product attention as new sales.

For the calculator: if you know net revenue retention, use net churn directly in the churn field (or even a negative value by lowering growth accordingly). The cleaner formulation is: net rate = gross new growth% − net churn%. Just be consistent about what each input includes.

The chart this calculator draws is more informative than any single number. A steep, smooth upward curve means healthy compounding — each month's growth builds on a larger base. That is the shape investors want to see, and it only holds while growth inputs stay constant, which is the optimistic assumption to stress-test.

A flat or gently sagging curve means churn is eating growth — the leaky bucket. This is actually the more useful result, because it quantifies the problem: 'at current churn we add only $X net per month' is a sentence that focuses a whole company on retention. Reducing churn by 2 points often adds more to the 12-month projection than increasing growth by 5 points, because churn applies to the entire base.

A downward curve is the alarm bell: churn exceeds growth, and the business is shrinking while the sales team celebrates closed deals. This is more common than founders admit, especially after a big launch spike normalises. If your curve points down, the projection has done its job — now the question is whether to fix onboarding, pricing, or the product itself before scaling spend.

Even honest forecasts fail in predictable ways. Knowing the failure modes lets you build scenarios instead of single numbers — and scenarios are what good planning runs on.

• ▸Anchoring on your best month instead of a 3–6 month trailing average.
• ▸Treating logo churn and revenue churn as interchangeable.
• ▸Assuming constant growth — real growth decays as the easy customers are won first.
• ▸Ignoring cohort quality: revenue from a great marketing month churns differently.
• ▸Forgetting that churn compounds on a growing base, so small differences explode over time.
• ▸Projecting one number instead of three scenarios (base, upside, downside).
• ▸Not updating the forecast when inputs move — a forecast is a living document.
• ▸Confusing bookings or signups with MRR — only count revenue that actually recurs.