Projection
Post-Launch Revenue Projector.
A revenue projector applies your monthly churn and your monthly new-customer rate, one month at a time, to your starting customer base. The compounding is what makes the curve interesting. Linear acquisition (say, 10 new customers a month) plus exponential churn (5 percent of an ever-growing base) produces an asymptote – your MRR plateaus at the point where customers acquired equals customers lost. The math is unforgiving: at 5 percent churn, 10 customers a month, and $49 ARPU, you cap at 200 customers and $9,800 of MRR no matter how long you run. To break through, fix churn or grow acquisition.
Published . Last reviewed .
Formula
Customers[n+1] = Customers[n] × (1 – Churn %) + New customers added/moCalculator
Inputs
Result
| Month | Customers | MRR |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 10 | $490 |
| 2 | 20 | $956 |
| 3 | 29 | $1,398 |
| 4 | 37 | $1,818 |
| 5 | 45 | $2,217 |
| 6 | 53 | $2,596 |
| 7 | 60 | $2,956 |
| 8 | 67 | $3,298 |
| 9 | 74 | $3,624 |
| 10 | 80 | $3,932 |
| 11 | 86 | $4,226 |
| 12 | 92 | $4,504 |
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Frequently asked
- Why does my projection plateau instead of growing forever?
- Because churn compounds. Every month you lose a percentage of your current base. As the base grows, the absolute number of customers lost grows too. At some point new acquisitions equal losses and you cap at the steady state of (new customers per month) divided by (churn rate).
- What is a realistic monthly new-customer rate for indie SaaS?
- Pre-revenue, anything is possible. Post-launch, most indie SaaS in the UnlockSaaS dataset are adding 3 to 30 customers a month for the first year. Above that you either have product-market fit or a paid-ads engine running.
- Should expansion revenue go into this projection?
- Not in this calculator. We hold ARPU constant to show the raw acquisition and retention math. Expansion is a real lever (price increases, plan upgrades, seat expansion) but it deserves its own model – it masks unit economics if blended in here.
Related calculators
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- Monthly Churn Cost Calculator – How much revenue evaporates every month while you focus on acquisition? The number that gets retention on the roadmap.
- CAC Payback Period Calculator – How many months of gross profit does it take a paid customer to pay back their acquisition cost? Below twelve, you can scale.
- Pricing Power Calculator – What happens to LTV, payback, and LTV-to-CAC if you raise your price 50 percent? Side-by-side answer.