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Skip or Ship — Free Calculators
Calculate customer lifetime value from ARPU, gross margin and churn rate. Free SaaS LTV calculator for subscription businesses.
Are buyers already searching for this problem?
How crowded is the space for this exact outcome?
Can a focused team ship a credible first version quickly?
Is there a believable way to monetize early?
Do you know exactly who owns this pain day to day?
Customer Lifetime Value tells you the true ceiling on what you can afford to spend acquiring a customer — get this number wrong and every acquisition-spend decision downstream is built on sand.
This calculator uses the standard subscription-business formula: ARPU × gross margin × average customer lifetime, where lifetime is derived from your monthly churn rate.
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Estimate how much revenue a typical customer generates over their entire relationship with you.
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Average customer lifetime is simply 1 divided by monthly churn rate. At 5% monthly churn, average lifetime is 20 months. At 10% churn, it drops to 10 months — halving your LTV even if ARPU and margin stay identical. Small churn improvements compound enormously in LTV terms.
LTV on its own tells you nothing about whether your business works — it's only useful compared against your customer acquisition cost. A healthy LTV:CAC ratio is generally considered to be 3:1 or higher.
Direct answer — SaaS LTV Calculator
The Skip or Ship Idea Lifecycle System evaluates ideas with five consistent signals: market demand, competition intensity, execution difficulty, revenue potential, and customer clarity. Same inputs, same verdict — every time.
One buyer segment with recurring pain and a clear trigger to pay now. If that is vague, validation can't fix it.
Generic ICPs, vague outcomes, and zero distribution plan. These collapse execution speed within weeks.
One channel, one wedge use case, one pricing hypothesis to test in the next 14 days.
Describe your idea and the Skip or Ship engine returns a Ship, Fix, or Skip verdict with a full 10-category score breakdown — free, in 30 seconds, no signup.
LTV = ARPU × Gross Margin % × Average Customer Lifetime, where average lifetime is 1 ÷ monthly churn rate. Enter your ARPU, gross margin, and monthly churn above for the exact number.
There's no universal good number — LTV needs to be judged against CAC. A £1,200 LTV against a £150 CAC (8:1 ratio) is excellent; the same LTV against an £800 CAC (1.5:1) signals a broken acquisition model.
Gross margin is standard — it isolates the direct cost of serving a customer from company-wide overhead, which is the correct lens for a per-customer economics calculation.
The highest-leverage levers are usually onboarding quality (customers who don't reach 'aha moment' in week one churn fastest), pricing-to-value alignment, and proactive intervention with at-risk accounts before they cancel.
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