Product Usage Frequency Grader
Grade product stickiness from your DAU-to-MAU ratio.
A 30% DAU/MAU means users come back roughly 9 days a month, a genuine habit. Sticky products churn far less and expand more easily, because they're embedded in the daily workflow.
DAU/MAU above ~20% signals a habitual product; 50%+ is elite (daily-use tools). Not every product should be daily-use, judge against your category's natural frequency.
About this calculator
Retention starts leaking long before a customer cancels, it starts the moment they stop opening the product. The DAU/MAU ratio is the earliest read on that, and this grader turns your daily and monthly active user counts into a stickiness percentage, an implied "days used per month" figure, and a plain verdict on whether you've built a daily utility or an idle tab.
How to use it
- Enter daily active users (DAU), unique users active on a typical day.
- Enter monthly active users (MAU), unique users active at least once in the trailing month.
- Read the stickiness ratio (DAU/MAU), the implied average days used per month, and the verdict band.
Methodology
Stickiness is DAU divided by MAU, expressed as a percentage, the standard DAU/MAU engagement ratio used across consumer and B2B SaaS products alike. Implied days used per month is that ratio applied to a 30-day month, a rough translation of the percentage into a usage-frequency figure that's easier to reason about intuitively.
The tool bands stickiness into four tiers: 50%+ is graded "Daily utility" (elite, daily-use-tool territory), 20-49% is "Sticky" (a genuine habit), 10-19% is "Occasional" (a caution zone), and under 10% is "Idle tab" (users rarely return), reflecting commonly cited industry ranges where 20%+ signals habitual usage and 50%+ marks best-in-class daily tools.
This is a point-in-time snapshot based on whatever DAU and MAU figures you enter, it doesn't track the trend over time or segment by user cohort or account. A rising or falling stickiness trend, or a wide gap between power users and the long tail, matters as much as the single blended number.
DAU/MAU is a usage-frequency metric, not a retention or revenue metric on its own. A high ratio correlates with lower churn and easier expansion in most SaaS products, but it doesn't directly measure either, pair it with churn and expansion metrics for the full retention picture.
FAQ
This tool treats 20% and above as sticky (a genuine habit) and 50%+ as elite, daily-utility territory. Below 10% is flagged as an "idle tab" signal, most users only open the product rarely. The right target still depends heavily on your product category.
No. A payroll tool or an annual tax product has a naturally low, and perfectly healthy, usage frequency; nobody should be opening it daily. Judge your ratio against what's natural for your category's use case, not against a universal daily-use benchmark.
Usage frequency is one of the earliest predictive signals of churn, it typically declines well before a cancellation or non-renewal happens. Catching a stickiness drop early gives customer success time to intervene, whereas waiting for a churn or renewal signal is often too late.
It's the stickiness percentage applied to a standard 30-day month, so 25% stickiness implies roughly 7.5 days of use per month. It's a simplified translation for intuition, not a measured count of actual login days per individual user.