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Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

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Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#1
A question to web-application providers: what percentage of your clients quit your service every month? is the rate different for free accounts compared to paying accounts?

p.s. Any links to some stats?

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#2
No public stats I can personally provide. But I have seen it vary wildly depending on the type of service. Businesses are generally slower to adopt a new service/tool, and once they are locked in can be apprehensive for change. Consumers can change on a whim if something better comes along.

Here are some interesting stats I found for Evernote: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/video-evernote-ceo-phil-lib...

Evernote has been pretty open in their stats over the course of their existence.

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#3
Here are my numbers for S3stat. We don't have free accounts, though we do have a 30 day trial.

  Visit to trial conversion:   3%
  Trial to paid conversion:    26%
  Average subscription length: 11.5 months
  Average cancels per month:   2%
Over time, those last two numbers keep getting better, since there's more time passed for our first loyal customers to inflate the average subscription length, and there's more people on board to lessen the impact of a few people cancelling.

It's worth noting that you only need to calculate one of those last two numbers to know the expected lifetime value of a visit to your site. Until you asked the question, I had never actually calculated my churn rate as a percentage of active users.

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#4

Here are my numbers for S3stat. We don't have free accounts, though we do have a 30 day trial. Visit to trial conversion: 3% Trial to paid conversion: 26% Average subscription length: 11.5 months Average cancels per month: 2% Over time, those last two numbers keep getting better, since there's more time passed for our first loyal customers to inflate the average subscription length, and there's more people on board t…

Interesting stats. How long have you been running S3stat?

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#5

Here are my numbers for S3stat. We don't have free accounts, though we do have a 30 day trial. Visit to trial conversion: 3% Trial to paid conversion: 26% Average subscription length: 11.5 months Average cancels per month: 2% Over time, those last two numbers keep getting better, since there's more time passed for our first loyal customers to inflate the average subscription length, and there's more people on board t…

Interesting stats. How long have you been running S3stat?

The beta went live at the end of 2007, and I started charging for it in February 2008.

S3stat goes squarely against one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to fellow startup kids: Never base an entire product off a missing feature in somebody else's thing.

Thus far Amazon have been good in keeping their AWS reports in the same state of disarray I found them in 3 years ago. I don't expect it will stay that way forever.

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting stats. How long have you been running S3stat?

The beta went live at the end of 2007, and I started charging for it in February 2008. S3stat goes squarely against one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to fellow startup kids: Never base an entire product off a missing feature in somebody else's thing. Thus far Amazon have been good in keeping their AWS reports in the same state of disarray I found them in 3 years ago. I don't expect it will stay that way fore…

I'm sure by then you will find other successful niches :)

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#7
This might help too: for really crap services (say, weightloss or the like), where people sign up and then pretty much never use the service, a typical average churn rate is 3 months. ie. it takes people 3 months on average to unsubscribe from a service they don't use.

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#8
post #2

No public stats I can personally provide. But I have seen it vary wildly depending on the type of service. Businesses are generally slower to adopt a new service/tool, and once they are locked in can be apprehensive for change. Consumers can change on a whim if something better comes along. Here are some interesting stats I found for Evernote: http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/video-evernote-ceo-phil-lib... Evernote h…

Agreed with businesses: once the charge on the CC is approved, they will be slow to remove it (because re-approving it can be though).

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#9

This might help too: for really crap services (say, weightloss or the like), where people sign up and then pretty much never use the service, a typical average churn rate is 3 months. ie. it takes people 3 months on average to unsubscribe from a service they don't use.

Are you speaking out of experience or do you have some stats? It seems unlikely that people take at least 3 months to unsubscribe a service they never use.

Re: Ask HN: What's your churn rate?

#10

This might help too: for really crap services (say, weightloss or the like), where people sign up and then pretty much never use the service, a typical average churn rate is 3 months. ie. it takes people 3 months on average to unsubscribe from a service they don't use.

Are you speaking out of experience or do you have some stats? It seems unlikely that people take at least 3 months to unsubscribe a service they never use.

Out of experience with 2 large services. Can't share stats, sorry. It may seem unlikely, but it's true :) I'm talking average, many take up to 6 months. Now you know why there are so many ads for crappy services online :) ps: I didn't say "at least", I said "on average".
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