Strategy
Churn
Churn is the share of users who stop using a product over a given period. It is the inverse of retention: the people who leave rather than the people who stay.
Why it matters
Watching churn tells you when people are quietly leaving, which is often an early warning that the product is not delivering enough value.
In depth
Churn is a symptom, not a cause, so the useful work is figuring out why people leave rather than just measuring how many do. A common mistake is treating it purely as a pricing or marketing issue; often the real reasons are confusion, unmet expectations, or a missing payoff that good onboarding and a clearer value proposition can address.
Real-world example
A subscription service that loses 8 percent of its paying members every month has a monthly churn rate of 8 percent.
Churn
−8%
per month