The 8 SaaS Metrics Every Founder Should Track

SaaS metrics advice tends to come in lists of thirty, which is a way of saying "measure nothing well." In practice, eight numbers tell you almost everything about the health of a subscription business. Here they are, with the formulas and the traps.

The revenue numbers#

1. MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). The sum of all subscription revenue normalized to a month. Track the components, not just the total: new MRR (from new customers), expansion MRR (upgrades), contraction MRR (downgrades), and churned MRR. A flat total can hide a leaky bucket being refilled by growth. ARR is just MRR x 12 - useful for annual-plan businesses, misleading if you're mostly monthly.

2. Net Revenue Retention (NRR). Of the revenue you had from a cohort a year ago, how much do you still have - including upgrades and downgrades, excluding new sales? Above 100% means your existing customers grow faster than they leave, and the business compounds even with zero new sales. This is the single metric investors weight most heavily, and the one founders track least.

The leak#

3. Churn rate. Two different numbers that people constantly confuse: logo churn (what fraction of customers left) and revenue churn (what fraction of MRR left). Losing ten $10 accounts is very different from losing one $1,000 account. For most B2B products, revenue churn is the one to watch; logo churn tells you about fit for small customers.

4. MRR growth rate. Month-over-month percentage growth in MRR. Early on this is the number that matters most - it compounds, so small improvements in monthly growth dwarf almost any other optimization.

The unit economics#

5. CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost). Total sales and marketing spend in a period divided by new customers acquired. Include salaries and tools, not just ad spend - otherwise you're lying to yourself.

6. LTV (Customer Lifetime Value). The simple version: average revenue per account per month, times gross margin, divided by monthly revenue churn. LTV is an estimate with big error bars - treat it as a sanity check, not a precision instrument.

7. LTV:CAC ratio. The classic rule of thumb is 3:1 or better. Below that, you're buying revenue at a loss; far above it (say 8:1), you may be under-investing in growth. Pair it with CAC payback period - how many months of margin until a customer pays for their acquisition. Shorter is safer, especially when cash is tight.

The product numbers#

8. Activation and retention. Revenue metrics lag by months; product metrics tell you today what revenue will do next quarter. Activation rate - the fraction of signups who reach your product's core value - is usually the highest-leverage number in the whole business, and it's read straight off a funnel. Retention curves tell you whether the product is actually sticky: a curve that flattens above zero means you have something; one that slides to zero means no growth hack will save you.

How to track this without a data team#

The revenue half of this list falls out of your billing data automatically - GraphJSON's Stripe integration streams every Stripe event, and we showed how to turn that into a revenue dashboard. The product half comes from logging events from your app. Neither requires a warehouse, a data engineer, or a six-month analytics implementation - just start logging and the dashboards build themselves.