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Are you using real, current numbers — not rough guesses that flatter the result?
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Calculate customer lifetime value from ARPU, gross margin and churn rate. Free SaaS LTV calculator for subscription businesses.
Are you using real, current numbers — not rough guesses that flatter the result?
Is your result healthy for your specific business model, not just positive?
Which single input, if wrong, would change the result most?
Does this hold up over 12 months, or only at today's volume?
What should change in the business because of this number?
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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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
Calculate customer lifetime value from ARPU, gross margin and churn rate. Free SaaS LTV calculator for subscription businesses.
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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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