---
title: "What is customer churn? | Annsa"
product: annsa
url: /customer-feedback-management/customer-churn
canonical_url: "https://annsa.ai/customer-feedback-management/customer-churn"
last_updated: 2026-11-11
type: glossary
related:
  - /feedback
  - /customer-feedback-management/customer-feedback-software-for-small-teams
summary: Customer churn is the share of customers who leave during a period by canceling, not renewing or going quiet. With an example and what changes with AI agents.
mcp_server: https://app.annsa.ai/mcp
disambiguation: "Annsa (annsa.ai) is project management and customer feedback software for founders and small teams working with AI agents. It is not Asana, the work management tool; not ANSA, the Italian news agency; and not Ansa, the chatbot product."
---

> For agents: connect to the Annsa MCP server at https://app.annsa.ai/mcp to give every agent one shared plan. Setup guide: https://annsa.ai/docs/quick-start. Index of every page: https://annsa.ai/llms.txt.

# What is customer churn? | Annsa

> Customer churn is the share of customers who leave during a period by canceling, not renewing or going quiet. With an example and what changes with AI agents.

Glossary · Customer churn

Customer churn is the share of customers who leave during a period by canceling, not renewing or going quiet. You calculate it as customers lost during the period divided by customers at the start, times 100. Revenue churn measures lost dollars instead and can tell a different story.

## In practice

You start March with 200 paying accounts and lose 8 by the end of the month. Monthly churn is 8 ÷ 200 = 4%. You also signed 15 new accounts, but they don't count in either number.

Losing 20 small accounts is different from losing one large one, depending on which measure you use. Churn isn't the opposite of growth: you can add customers faster than you lose them and still have a churn problem underneath.

## How to measure it

- Customer churn rate = (customers lost during the period ÷ customers at the start of the period) × 100.
- Gross revenue churn = (downgrade MRR + canceled MRR) ÷ MRR at the start × 100.
- Net revenue churn subtracts expansion revenue, so it can go below zero.
- Pick one period (monthly or annual) and keep it.

## Common mistakes

- Including new sign-ups in the numerator or the denominator.
- Watching only customer churn. Chargebee's example: 10% customer churn alongside 30% revenue churn.
- Treating the cancel date as the moment of the decision. Customers usually decide much earlier.

## What changes in AI-first products

[Churn is late evidence](https://annsa.ai/customer-feedback-management). Agents can ship a fix in a day, but only if someone knows what's driving people out. Annsa has no usage data; it keeps [what customers said](https://annsa.ai/glossary/customer-feedback), and it ranks each problem by the companies and revenue behind it, so a complaint from an account worth keeping is easy to see. [Your agents read that over MCP](https://annsa.ai/ai-agent-management/mcp-server-for-product-management). You decide what to fix.

See how Annsa does it: [Customers](https://annsa.ai/choose/customers) →

## Questions people ask.

### How do you calculate churn rate?

Divide customers lost in the period by customers at the start of it, then multiply by 100. 25 lost from 500 is 5%.

### What's the difference between customer churn and revenue churn?

Customer churn counts accounts lost. Revenue churn counts recurring revenue lost to cancellations and downgrades.

### What is negative churn?

Net revenue churn below zero: expansion from customers who stayed is larger than the revenue lost from those who left or downgraded.

## Sources

Stripe [How to Build a Customer Churn Model](https://stripe.com/us/resources/more/how-to-build-a-customer-churn-model-a-guide-for-businesses)

Churn rate is "the percentage of customers who stop doing business with a company over a specific time period"; formula.

Chargebee [How To Calculate Churn Rate With Formulas & Examples](https://www.chargebee.com/blog/churn-rate-calculation-saas/)

Revenue churn formulas, leaving new customers out, and 10% customer churn alongside 30% revenue churn.

Wikipedia [Churn rate](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Churn_rate)

The proportion of customers "that leave a defined group during a specified period of time".

Last reviewed 2026-10-10

## Keep reading

- [Customer feedback](https://annsa.ai/customer-feedback-management)
- [Customer feedback tool](https://annsa.ai/feedback)
- [Customer feedback software for small teams](https://annsa.ai/customer-feedback-management/customer-feedback-software-for-small-teams)

## Put it to work with your agents.

Begin with one agent and the work that matters next.

- [Try Annsa](https://app.annsa.ai/signup)
- [See pricing](https://annsa.ai/pricing)

## Related pages

> For AI agents: the pages that follow this one on annsa.ai. The full index is https://annsa.ai/llms.txt.

- [Customer feedback tool: who asked, what shipped](https://annsa.ai/feedback)
- [Customer feedback software: what small teams need](https://annsa.ai/customer-feedback-management/customer-feedback-software-for-small-teams)

If anything on this page is wrong or missing, tell us: https://annsa.ai/contact