Churn
Churn is the metric that most directly determines whether your app grows or shrinks. The Churn tab measures the merchants and revenue you actually lost to cancellation — not estimates, not trial expirations — so you can act on a signal that is honest about the problem.
Prerequisite
Churn data requires your Partner API to be connected and synced.
How Ranksy calculates churn
⚠️ Ranksy churn is derived from the canonical subscription cancellation ledger. A churn event is recorded only when a subscription ends because the merchant uninstalled the app, the shop was deactivated, or the merchant downgraded to a free plan (i.e., $0 MRR). Trial cancellations — where someone starts a trial and never converts — are tracked separately in the Trials tab and do not count toward churn here.
This means your churn number is a measurement of post-paid losses, not failed acquisitions. It will typically be lower than a naive count of install-uninstall events because:
- Merchants who uninstall during a free trial are not in the cancellation ledger.
- Shopify sometimes sends multiple events for a single lifecycle change; Ranksy deduplicates them.
Rolling window selector
The top of the Churn tab has a window selector with four options:
| Window | Best used for |
|---|---|
| 7 days | Catching an acute spike — e.g. after a product change or pricing update |
| 30 days | Standard monthly health check; the most commonly cited benchmark |
| 90 days | Smoothing out short-term noise; good for quarterly reporting |
| 365 days | Annual baseline; useful for comparing across seasons |
The selected window changes the churn rate calculation and the chart, but the cohort lists (see below) remain anchored to the date range you chose in the date picker.
Logo churn vs revenue churn
The Churn tab tracks two distinct metrics:
Logo churn rate
The percentage of paying customers you lost in the rolling window.
Logo churn rate = customers churned ÷ customers at risk × 100
"Customers at risk" is the number of active paying merchants at the start of the window. A 5% monthly logo churn rate means you lost 5 out of every 100 paying customers that month.
Revenue churn rate
The percentage of MRR you lost in the rolling window.
Revenue churn rate = MRR churned ÷ MRR base × 100
Revenue churn can differ from logo churn significantly if your high-paying customers churn at a different rate than low-paying ones. If revenue churn > logo churn, you're losing your best customers disproportionately — a serious signal.
Charts
Churn rate over time
A line chart showing logo churn and revenue churn at the selected window across the date range. Look for:
- A sudden spike — often caused by a billing change, a competitor launch, or a product regression.
- A slow upward trend — indicates structural problems with retention, not a one-time event.
- Divergence between logo and revenue churn — tells you whether large or small customers are churning.
Plan breakdown
Revenue churn split by plan. If one plan churns at a much higher rate than others, it often means the plan's price-to-value ratio is off, or merchants on that plan aren't getting enough onboarding attention.
Churn cohort list
Below the charts, the cohort list shows every cancellation event in the selected date range: the merchant shop, the plan they were on, their MRR at cancellation, and the date. You can export this list for use in win-back campaigns.
💡 Use the cohort list alongside your Customers tab. Click any merchant row to see their full subscription timeline and understand whether they were a long-tenured customer or churned quickly after converting.
Benchmarks
Healthy churn rates for Shopify app businesses typically look like:
| Window | Healthy logo churn |
|---|---|
| Monthly (30d) | < 5% |
| Annual (365d) | < 40% |
These are benchmarks, not rules. A lower-ARPA app with many small merchants will have a naturally higher churn rate than a high-ARPA app serving large merchants. Compare your own trend over time rather than obsessing over a single number.
FAQ
Q: Why does my churn rate differ from what I calculate manually? A: Ranksy churn is post-paid only (not trial cancellations) and deduplicates events. A manual count of uninstall events will usually be higher because it includes trial exits and duplicate API events.
Q: Can I see which merchants churned at a specific time? A: Yes. Set your date range to the period you want, then scroll to the cohort list below the charts.
Q: The 7-day window shows a spike. Is something wrong? A: A 7-day window amplifies short-term variation. Compare it to the 30-day window before drawing conclusions. A spike that disappears in the 30-day view is likely noise; one that persists is worth investigating.
Q: Does downgrading to a free plan count as churn? A: Yes. A downgrade to a $0 plan is treated as revenue churn (you lost the MRR) even though the merchant stays installed. It appears in both the revenue churn rate and the cohort list.
Next steps
- NRR — measure whether expansion from existing customers offsets churn
- Subscriptions — see which plans are losing subscribers
- Trials — track trial-to-paid conversion (distinct from post-paid churn)
- Revenue Overview — top-line context