A subscription is worth its monthly price divided by the rate at which subscribers cancel, not that price times twelve. For the median app the cancellation rate is high enough to turn a $10 plan into roughly $71 of lifetime revenue, well short of the $120 a year the pricing page implies.
That single ratio, revenue per payer over churn, is most of subscription economics, and many developers meet it only after the product has already been priced.
The formula that sets the number
Lifetime value from a subscriber is the average revenue you collect from them each month divided by the fraction who leave each month. At $10 a month and 14% monthly churn, the average subscriber stays about seven months and pays you about $71. Drop churn to 5% and the same $10 plan is worth $200, because the average subscriber now stays nearly two years.
Nothing else in the model moves the outcome as far. Doubling your price while holding churn flat doubles lifetime value; halving churn while holding price flat nearly triples it at these levels. The price is printed on the paywall and the churn is invisible, which is exactly why the churn is where the money is won or lost.
Where the median app actually sits
In RevenueCat's 2025 State of Subscription Apps report, the largest public dataset on this and covering tens of thousands of apps, median monthly subscriber churn sits around 13% to 14%. Read as retention, about 43% of people who start a monthly plan are still paying at day 90, and roughly 17% are still there a year later.
Annual plans behave differently. Around 44% of annual subscribers renew after twelve months, against 17% for monthly and under 4% for weekly. The plan length you sell is not a minor billing choice: it sets how long the average customer pays before the model has to win them back.
So the honest median is a subscriber worth about seven months of their monthly price. A projection built on a full year was roughly double reality before a line of code shipped.
Why two apps at the same price earn different money
Churn is not a property of your pricing. It is a property of what your app is for, and it varies enough by category to swamp every other lever.
Categories that sell weekly plans churn hardest. Games sell about 82% of their subscriptions as weekly, and weekly plans retain worst of all. Productivity sells about 77% monthly. Health and fitness sells about 68% annual, and it shows: fitness churn has fallen to around 7% monthly as those apps moved subscribers onto yearly commitments. A fitness app and a game can both charge $10 and see a threefold difference in what each subscriber is ultimately worth, purely because of when the renewal decision comes up.
Price interacts with this in a way that catches people out. In entertainment, low-priced monthly subscriptions retain roughly twice as well as high-priced ones. The cheap subscription there is not leaving money on the table; it is buying the retention that makes the whole model work.
What a realistic per-user figure looks like
The spread across categories is wide. The strongest business apps, often billing through the web, reach a median lifetime value above $250 per payer. Consumer apps mostly live an order of magnitude below that. AI apps have opened a real gap over the last two years, carrying roughly a 41% first-year premium over comparable non-AI apps, about $30 against $21 in RevenueCat's figures, though their monthly plans also churn faster, so the premium is front-loaded.
Here is the concession that matters: for a large share of apps, a subscription is the wrong instrument. It works when the product is used repeatedly and the value recurs, a habit or a workflow or a service that keeps doing something. If your app is used in bursts, or solves a problem once, a subscription posts a good first month and then churns to nothing, and the formula above is what makes that inevitable rather than surprising. That is the case where a one-time purchase or a software licence beats a subscription outright, and where sharing a slice of bandwidth, which earns on days the app simply runs with no purchase to renew, can carry an app nobody will pay a monthly fee for. Our earnings page has those numbers.
Working out your own number this week
- Take your real monthly churn from the last three months: payers who cancelled divided by payers at the start. Without it, you do not yet know what a subscriber is worth.
- Divide your average monthly revenue per payer by that churn. That is your current lifetime value per subscriber, and it is usually lower than the annual price suggested.
- Compare it against your cost to acquire one payer. If acquisition costs more than a third of lifetime value, growth is spending money to lose it slowly.
- Before touching price, check whether an annual plan fits your product. Moving even a fraction of subscribers from monthly to annual moves churn more than a price change usually can.
If that arithmetic says a subscription cannot clear its own acquisition cost, the model is the problem, not the price. The freemium-versus-paid decision and the per-category revenue ranges are where to look next.
Your first 100 devices go live today.
No sales call, no approval to start. Sign up, drop the SDK in, and watch the first device appear in your dashboard.
Create your free accountFrequently asked
How is subscription lifetime value calculated?
Lifetime value per subscriber is the average revenue you collect from a payer each month divided by your monthly churn rate, the fraction of payers who cancel each month. At $10 a month and 14% monthly churn a subscriber is worth about $71, because the average one stays roughly seven months. Lowering churn raises this figure faster than raising price does, since the divisor compounds over every future month a subscriber stays.
What is a normal monthly churn rate for an app subscription?
Across the largest public dataset, from RevenueCat, median monthly subscriber churn is around 13% to 14%, which means about 17% of people who start a monthly plan are still paying a year later. Healthy consumer apps aim below 5% monthly, and categories built on annual plans, such as health and fitness, reach roughly 7%. Weekly plans and games often run above 15%, and that ceiling caps how much any subscriber can ultimately be worth.
Why do annual plans earn more than monthly plans?
An annual subscriber commits for twelve months before facing a renewal decision, so far fewer of them churn within the first year: roughly 44% of annual subscribers renew after a year, against about 17% of monthly ones. Because lifetime value is revenue divided by churn, that longer commitment raises the value of each subscriber substantially, which is why categories like fitness push customers toward yearly plans even at a discount.
Do higher-priced subscriptions always retain worse?
Not always, but in some categories the effect is strong. In entertainment, low-priced monthly subscriptions retain roughly twice as well as high-priced ones, so a cheaper plan there can produce more total revenue per subscriber despite the smaller monthly figure. In other categories a higher price signals quality and retains fine, so the rule is to measure retention at your actual price rather than assume either direction.
Is a subscription the right model for my app?
A subscription fits an app whose value recurs, one used repeatedly where the reason to keep paying renews itself each month. It fits badly where the app solves a problem once or is used in bursts, because those subscribers cancel quickly and lifetime value collapses to a month or two. For apps in that second group, a one-time purchase, a software licence, or bandwidth sharing that earns while the app runs will usually out-earn a subscription most users cancel.