SaaS Benchmarks
For United States Startups

Software as a Service is a software delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted.

15%

MRR Growth Rate
[Monthly]

0.8%

Revenue Churn Rate
[Monthly]

3.1%

Customer Churn Rate
[Monthly]

6%

Conversion Rate
[Freemium]

10%

Conversion Rate
[Opt-in Free Trial]

33%

Conversion Rate
[Opt-out Free Trial]

3.6

Quick Ratio
[Average]

35mo

Customer Lifetime
[Average]

$2k

Lifetime Value
[Average]


Marginalia


SaaS adoption has skyrocketed over the past decade. In 2011, just 13% of US companies used SaaS. Today, that number is 82%. Moreover, the United States continues to hold more than half the SaaS world market share.

The beauty of the subscription model is that relationships are built right into the revenue model. You provide consistent value to your customers, and in turn, they continue to pay you for that value. No other business model in history gives us, entrepreneurs, such alignment with their customers. That is why "thriving ecosystem" is a must-have for success of any SaaS platform (B2B, B2C, C2C).

How did I get those numbers? As I’ve been doing marketing since 2000 I’ve had a chance to accumulate big and small data from corporations, small ventures, own startups, open Google crawlers and API’s, white- and gray-hat marketing communities, helpful insights from colleagues. The final actual numbers for the metrics you see are the results of qualitative research. That means, first, I have an average (mean quantitative) values, and then manually match it with expert numbers (median qualitative). If both data fit - we’re good. If expert numbers go out - I adopt Bayes' law and Daniel Kahneman’s methods to balance the data.

Bear in mind, all those marketing benchmarks and startup metrics below relate to the United States market only. Though they can be applied to other T1 countries (US, UK, CA, AU, NZ), these metrics don’t represent traction benchmarks for startups and companies in T2 and T3 regional markets.


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