Free Customer Lifetime Value Calculator

Enter your subscription revenue and churn rate to instantly see how much each customer is worth over their lifetime.

Your Data

Average Revenue per User (Monthly)

Monthly Churn Rate

Don't know your churn rate? Use our churn rate calculator.

Gross Margin (Optional)

Leave blank to default to 100%. Enter your margin for a profit-adjusted LTV.

Key Takeaways

LTV is average revenue per customer multiplied by how long they stay, so it moves with churn far more sharply than with price. Halving churn doubles average lifetime.
How LTV accrues depends on the billing period. On weekly app plans, cumulative LTV in a trial cohort grows from $7.40 on the day of install to $54.50 by day 380, while annual plans start at $42.08 and reach only $49.92 (Adapty State of In-App Subscriptions, 2026).
Free trials do not always raise lifetime value. Trial users are worth 85.1% more than direct buyers in Utilities and 63.6% more in Health & Fitness, but 21.2% less in Lifestyle and 13.7% less in Productivity (Adapty State of In-App Subscriptions, 2026).
The common LTV:CAC target is 3:1, with B2B SaaS nearer 4:1 and B2C SaaS 2.5:1 (First Page Sage LTV:CAC Benchmark, 2025). Those ratios come from one agency's client roster rather than an industry-wide sample, so treat them as a direction of travel rather than a bar.

Customer Lifetime Benchmarks

Range	Avg. Customer Lifespan
Short	0–12 months
Average	12–24 months
Strong	24+ months

What Is Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)?

Customer lifetime value is the total revenue you expect from a customer before they leave. For a subscription business it's the simplest possible product: what they pay each period, multiplied by how many periods they stay.

That makes it a churn metric wearing different clothes. Price and average revenue per account move LTV linearly, but lifetime is 1 ÷ churn, so a change in churn moves LTV much harder than an equivalent change in price. It's also the number that tells you what you can afford to spend on acquisition, which is why it rarely travels alone.

How to Calculate LTV for Subscription Businesses

The basic formula is ARPA × Average Customer Lifetime, where lifetime in months is 1 ÷ monthly churn rate. At $50 per month and 5% monthly churn, average lifetime is 20 months and LTV is $1,000. Apply your gross margin if you want a profit figure rather than a revenue one, which is the version worth comparing against acquisition cost.

The formula assumes a constant churn rate, and real cohorts rarely oblige. Early months churn hardest and survivors churn more slowly, so a single blended rate understates the value of long-tenured customers and misprices the early ones. Treat any single LTV figure as a planning estimate rather than a measurement, and re-derive it per cohort once you have enough history to do so.

Why LTV Matters More Than Monthly Revenue

Monthly revenue tells you what happened; LTV tells you what a customer is worth over the whole relationship, which is the number acquisition spend has to be judged against. A business that knows its LTV can price its marketing; one that doesn't is guessing.

The accrual shape matters as much as the total, and it varies enormously by billing period. On weekly app plans a trial cohort's cumulative LTV runs from $7.40 on install day to $54.50 by day 380, growth of 636%, while annual plans open at $42.08 and finish at $49.92, growth of 18.6% (Adapty State of In-App Subscriptions, 2026). Annual plans deliver almost all their value immediately; weekly plans earn it slowly and only from subscribers who keep renewing. Two businesses with the same LTV can therefore have completely different cash positions and completely different exposure to a churn spike.

How to Increase Your Customer Lifetime Value

Churn is the lever with the most leverage, because lifetime is its reciprocal. Cutting churn from 5% to 4% per month extends average lifetime from 20 to 25 months and lifts LTV by a quarter without changing price at all.

After that, look at trials and billing period rather than at price. Trial users renew better on weekly app plans, at 59.2% against 37.0% for direct buyers (Adapty State of In-App Subscriptions, 2026), but the effect is not universal: trials raise lifetime value by 85.1% in Utilities and lower it by 21.2% in Lifestyle (Adapty State of In-App Subscriptions, 2026). Test the mechanism on your own categories before assuming a trial helps, and check the renewal rate rather than the conversion rate, since those two often move in opposite directions.

Customer LTV Calculator FAQ

The traditional cross-industry benchmark is 3:1, meaning you spend about a third of a customer's lifetime revenue to acquire them. B2B SaaS tends to run nearer 4:1 and B2C SaaS nearer 2.5:1 (First Page Sage LTV:CAC Benchmark, 2025), with fintech and cybersecurity around 5:1 in the SaaS-only cut (First Page Sage SaaS LTV:CAC, 2025). Read all of those as directional: they come from one agency's own client roster rather than an industry-wide sample, the source states no number of companies behind them, and it discloses that its data skews toward organic channels and B2B, so the ratios sit higher than a paid-heavy or consumer business would see.

Margin-adjusted, whenever you're comparing against acquisition cost. Gross LTV counts revenue you never keep, so an LTV:CAC ratio built on it flatters every business with real cost of delivery. Use gross LTV only for period-on-period comparison against your own history, where the margin cancels out.

Mostly through churn and expansion rather than price. B2B subscriptions churn more slowly and expand within accounts, so lifetimes are longer and LTV keeps growing after the sale. Consumer subscriptions churn faster and rarely expand, so LTV is closer to fixed at signup. The gap shows in acquisition economics: the common LTV:CAC target is 4:1 for B2B SaaS against 2.5:1 for B2C (First Page Sage LTV:CAC Benchmark, 2025), from that same agency client roster.

Because lifetime is the reciprocal of churn, not a linear function of it. For example, going from 5% to 4% churn per month moves lifetime from 20 to 25 months, a 25% gain; going from 2% to 1% moves it from 50 to 100 months, a 100% gain. The same one-point improvement is worth steadily more as churn falls, which is why low-churn businesses defend it so hard.

Yes, as long as the churn rate and the revenue figure use the same period. Enter annual revenue per account with annual churn and lifetime comes out in years. The more common mistake is mixing them, which inflates LTV by a factor of twelve and is easy to miss because the result still looks plausible.