Average subscriber lifetime
12.5 months
Free calculator
Type your cost per period, target margin, and monthly churn. The price you need to charge and the lifetime value it implies move as you type. No email, no gate, nothing leaves this page.
The calculator
The boxes start filled with an illustrative example, not a benchmark. Replace it with your own numbers. Cost and margin are per billing period; churn is monthly.
What it costs you to fulfil one billing period: product cost, box, packaging, and anything else that scales with it.
The share of the price you want left over after cost, before acquisition cost or anything else.
The share of subscribers who cancel in an average month.
Price to charge
At $34.29 a period, a typical subscriber sticks around 12.5 months and is worth $428.57 in revenue, $278.57 of it profit.
price = cost / (1 - target margin / 100) average lifetime = 1 / (monthly churn / 100) lifetime revenue = price * average lifetime lifetime profit = (price - cost) * average lifetime
Average lifetime here is the standard flat-churn approximation, 1 divided by the churn rate. It is a useful estimate, not a guarantee, see the note below.
See it on your own data Real numbers from your Shopify store, not a guess.
This assumes a flat monthly churn rate applied evenly across a subscriber's entire lifetime. Real subscription cohorts almost never behave that way: they tend to lose people fastest in the first month or two, then settle into a stickier core that sticks around much longer than the flat rate would suggest. That means the "average lifetime" figure above, which comes from the standard 1-divided-by-churn formula, usually overstates how long a typical subscriber sticks around in practice.
This is not a flaw specific to this calculator, it is the same caveat that applies to any flat-churn LTV formula, including the ones inside most subscription analytics tools.
Questions
Start from your cost per period and a target margin, and let price fall out of that, which is what this calculator does. Then check the price against what similar subscriptions in your category charge, and against what your target customer is actually willing to pay. Cost-plus pricing is a reasonable starting point, not the final word.
It varies a lot by category and by how much you spend to acquire a subscriber. A higher margin per period gives you more room to spend on acquisition and still come out ahead over a subscriber's lifetime. There is no single healthy number that applies everywhere, the right target depends on your acquisition cost and how long subscribers typically stay.
Monthly churn is the share of subscribers who cancel in a given month. Annual churn compounds that over twelve months, so it is always a larger percentage than the monthly rate, not twelve times it. This calculator uses monthly churn because that is the figure most billing systems report directly.
No, and that is deliberate. What you spend to acquire a subscriber, ads, promotions, referral incentives, is a separate number, commonly called CAC. Comparing lifetime profit against CAC is how you find out whether acquisition spend is actually paying for itself, but that comparison needs your own acquisition data, which this calculator does not ask for.
Because that formula assumes every subscriber, from their first month to their fiftieth, cancels at the same flat rate. In practice, a meaningful share of subscribers churn in the first month or two, often called early churn, and the ones who make it past that point tend to be much stickier than the flat average implies. The formula is a simple, widely used estimate, but it is an approximation of a curve, not the curve itself.
Next
Upstream reads real per-order cost, real per-SKU landed cost, and real per-order shipping straight from your store, and nets ad spend and returns against it too. It is the connected version of the calculator above.