92 terms from SaaS and Subscription Economics, each defined in a sentence or two, with a link to the calculator that works the number out where one exists.
Any growth in revenue from an account you already have.
Short for annual contract value.
What one contract is worth per year.
A year paid upfront. Better cash position, shorter payback, usually a discount.
Open the calculator →Contracted subscription revenue over a year, normalised.
Open the calculator →Average revenue per account. The B2B version, where one account holds many users.
Average revenue per paying user. Strips out the free tier.
Average revenue per user, counting free users too.
Short for annual recurring revenue. Excludes one-off fees, and people include them anyway.
Open the calculator →The same annually.
The mean across all contracts. Watch the median too, because a few enterprise deals distort it.
What you actually invoiced.
The value of contracts signed. Not revenue yet.
The rate at which a business consumes cash, measured from bank balances rather than from the income statement. Gross burn is everything going out; net burn subtracts what comes in.
Open the calculator →Accounts grouped by when they left, to find what they had in common.
Open the calculator →Annual recurring revenue lost.
Revenue under signed contract, including what has not started yet.
Paying for what gets used, usually metered.
Another name for the same thing.
Recurring revenue lost to downgrades, without anyone leaving.
How much they shrank it.
How much new recurring revenue each unit of spend produced.
Open the calculator →Money collected for service not yet delivered. A liability, not income.
Annual recurring revenue added by existing customers.
Accounts grouped by how much they grew.
Extra recurring revenue from existing customers upgrading.
How much existing customers grew their spend.
Charging by which capabilities are unlocked.
One price for everything. Simple to sell, hard to grow revenue from.
Time-limited full access. Converts better than freemium and grows the base slower.
Everything included: media, salaries, tools, commission. The only version finance recognises.
Open the calculator →Short for gross dollar retention. The honest measure of whether customers stay.
Revenue kept from existing customers, capped at one hundred percent.
Growth counting only additions. Flattering, and useless alone.
Customers or revenue kept, before expansion.
The share of opening recurring revenue still present at period end, counting only losses from churn and contraction. It cannot exceed 100 percent, which is what makes it the harsher of the two retention measures.
Open the calculator →A base fee plus usage. The most common model in modern software.
Winning a small foothold then growing inside the account. Lower initial acquisition cost, longer payback.
Open the calculator →Month-on-month growth in qualified leads. A leading indicator of revenue.
Short for lead velocity rate.
The portion coming from marketing.
Growth driven by demand generation feeding self-serve signup.
Short for monthly contract value.
Short for marketing-led growth.
The same per month.
Month-by-month payment. Higher headline price, slower cash, higher churn.
Percentage change in monthly recurring revenue.
Short for net dollar retention. The number investors ask about first.
Annual growth after churn and contraction.
Gross burn minus cash received in the same period. It is the figure that actually reduces the balance, so runway is always calculated from net burn rather than gross.
Open the calculator →Revenue kept including expansion. Above one hundred percent means the base grows without new customers.
Growth after all losses are subtracted.
The change in annual recurring revenue across a period, after new business and expansion are reduced by contraction and churn. It is the only one of the four movements that reaches the headline figure.
Open the calculator →New plus expansion minus contraction and churn. The single number that says whether the month was good.
The same including expansion.
Annual recurring revenue from new customers.
Recurring revenue from customers who just arrived.
The cost behind customers who arrived without paid media. Never actually zero.
Another name for seat-based pricing.
How much pipeline each unit of marketing spend created.
Short for product-led growth.
Product qualified lead. A user whose behaviour shows they are ready to pay.
The unit you charge against, such as seats, events or gigabytes. Choosing it badly caps the business.
Growth driven by people using the product rather than by sales calls.
Revenue from customers who came back.
The share of lost customers who returned.
Margin on subscription revenue after hosting and support. Decides how much acquisition you can fund.
Open the calculator →Contracts renewing in the same period, tracked together.
Money leaving. Higher than logo churn when your biggest accounts go, lower when your smallest do.
Recording revenue as it is earned rather than when cash arrives.
How many months of cash remain at the current net burn. It assumes nothing changes and that every dollar in the account is genuinely spendable, which is rarely true of money already committed to tax or suppliers.
Open the calculator →The financial logic of selling software by subscription, where you pay for the customer upfront and get paid back monthly.
Open the calculator →The standard set of numbers subscription businesses run on.
The portion of acquisition cost coming from sales salaries and commission.
Opportunities times deal size times win rate, divided by cycle length. The whole sales engine in one number.
Growth driven by a sales team working deals.
Additional licences inside an existing account.
Charging per licence. Predictable, and it punishes the customer for adding users.
Short for sales-led growth.
Packages at fixed price points.
How long before a new user gets something worth paying for.
Accounts grouped by how heavily they use the product.
How much of what they bought they actually use. Low usage is churn arriving late.
Charging by consumption. Revenue scales with value delivered and becomes harder to forecast.