AppCalcsRetention
Churn Break-Even Calculator
How much churn can your price and acquisition cost actually carry?
Free calculator
Your assumptions
Highest churn you can carry
- Churn at pure break-even
- 21.23%
- Required average lifetime
- 14.1 months
Estimate only. Solved by searching for the churn rate at which lifetime value after Apple's commission meets your target. Break-even churn is where a subscriber merely repays what they cost to acquire, which leaves nothing for building or running the app.
Working backwards from churn
Most churn advice is directional: lower is better. That is true and not much use when you are deciding whether a retention problem is urgent. This calculator inverts the usual lifetime-value question and gives you a threshold instead — the churn rate above which the economics stop working at your current price and acquisition cost.
Two numbers come out. The maximum churn meets your target return, three times acquisition cost by convention. Break-even churn is the harder floor: above it, a subscriber does not even repay what they cost to acquire, and growth actively loses money.
There is no formula for this because Apple's commission changes at month thirteen, so the calculator searches for the crossing point instead. If the target is unreachable, that is a pricing or acquisition problem rather than a retention one — no amount of retention work fixes a subscriber who is too cheap for what they cost to win.