Net Revenue Retention Forecaster
Project ARR from your existing base using churn and expansion.
NRR of 108% means your base holds and grows slightly. Solid, but lifting expansion a few points dramatically changes the three-year picture.
NRR above 100% means existing customers alone grow revenue. It's the single strongest driver of both compounding growth and valuation multiple.
About this calculator
Net revenue retention is the single number that tells you whether your existing customer base is a growth engine or a slow leak, before a single new logo is sold. This forecaster takes your current ARR, annual gross revenue churn and annual expansion, folds them into an NRR rate, and compounds that rate three years forward so you can see what your base alone is worth if new-customer acquisition stopped tomorrow.
How to use it
- Enter your current ARR.
- Enter annual gross revenue churn, the percentage of ARR lost to cancellations and downgrades over a year.
- Enter annual expansion, the percentage of ARR gained from upsells and cross-sells across existing customers.
- Read the resulting NRR rate and the ARR your existing base compounds to at year one, two and three, with no new logos added.
Methodology
NRR is computed as 100 minus gross churn plus expansion, so a 10% churn rate offset by 18% expansion yields 108% NRR. This is the standard net dollar retention formula: it nets losses from existing customers against gains from those same customers, and deliberately excludes any revenue from new customers acquired during the period.
The three-year projection compounds that NRR rate: year one ARR is current ARR times the NRR factor, year two multiplies by the factor again (NRR squared), year three by NRR cubed. This mirrors how retention actually compounds in a subscription business, this year's expansion and churn apply to a base that already reflects last year's movements.
Because the projection holds NRR flat across all three years, it's a scenario tool, not a forecast that adapts to a changing mix. If churn or expansion is trending, rerun the numbers with next year's expected rate rather than trusting one static NRR to hold for 36 months.
The tool color-codes the result: 110%+ is graded as best-in-class, 100-109% as a holding pattern, and anything below 100% as a shrinking base, the thresholds SaaS investors and operators commonly use to judge NRR health.
FAQ
NRR is specifically designed to isolate how your existing customers behave, separate from your ability to sell new ones. Mixing in new-logo revenue would hide a shrinking base behind strong sales, which is exactly the blind spot NRR exists to catch.
Any upsell or cross-sell revenue added by customers already in your base, seat growth, tier upgrades, add-on modules. It should be measured the same way as your churn figure, as a percentage of starting ARR, so the two net out cleanly.
It means your base is flat, not growing or shrinking on its own. That's adequate but not exceptional; most benchmark tables put 100-109% as average, 110%+ as strong, and 120%+ as elite for enterprise SaaS.
Because NRR compounds. A gap of a few points between 100% and 110% looks small in year one but produces a materially different ARR by year three, which is why investors weight NRR so heavily when pricing a growth-stage SaaS company.