Customer lifetime value (LTV) is the net revenue you expect from one subscriber before they cancel.
For a subscription app, the quick version is net price per billing period divided by the churn rate per period, weighted by your plan mix and multiplied by trial conversion.
Enter your price, plan mix, trial conversion, churn or renewal rate, and store fee in the calculator above to get LTV per paying subscriber and per trial start.
The calculator inputs
- Price: what the subscriber pays per period, for each plan. Use the price people actually pay after intro offers, not your list price.
- Plan mix: the share of new subscribers on monthly vs annual (or weekly). Plan mix often moves LTV more than price does.
- Trial conversion: the share of trial starts that become paying subscribers. Our trial conversion benchmarks give typical ranges. Leave it at 100% to get LTV per paying subscriber only.
- Churn or renewal rate: monthly churn for monthly plans, and the first-year renewal rate for annual plans. Our churn rate calculator works this out from your subscriber counts, and the subscription churn benchmarks show what is normal.
- Store fee: the share the app store keeps. On the App Store you get 70% of each payment during a subscriber's first year and 85% after one year of paid service, and members of the Small Business Program get 85% from the start, per Apple's subscription docs. Google Play's fee on auto-renewing subscriptions is 15%, and in the US, UK, EEA, Australia and Japan it is moving to 10% plus a 5% billing fee on the first $1M of yearly earnings, per Google's service fee page.
How to read the output
LTV per paying subscriber tells you what a converted customer is worth.
LTV per trial start is the number to set against your cost to get someone into a trial, since many trial users never pay.
Treat the output as an estimate, not a forecast.
It assumes churn stays flat, while real cohorts usually churn fastest in the first few months and then settle.
If you have only a few months of data, cap the lifetime at 24 or 36 months to stay conservative.
Use it to compare options, not just to report one number.
A change that cuts conversion can still raise LTV.
BuyBye raised its yearly price 50% and saw 19% fewer conversions but 25% more proceeds per user.
Zumba sent paywall taps to a web checkout: immediate conversions fell 25%, while LTV rose 17%.
The reverse happens too. BoldVoice tested a hard paywall with no close button and got more trial starts, but refunds rose by more than the gain.
A tool that only counts trials would have called that a winner.
The LTV formula
For each plan, the calculator uses the standard geometric lifetime: if a share c of subscribers churns each period, the average subscriber pays for 1 / c periods.
- Monthly plan LTV = monthly price × (1 − store fee) / monthly churn
- Annual plan LTV = annual price × (1 − store fee) / (1 − renewal rate)
- Blended LTV per subscriber = (annual share × annual LTV) + (monthly share × monthly LTV)
- LTV per trial start = blended LTV × trial conversion rate
Worked example: a monthly plan at $9.99 with 8% monthly churn, an annual plan at $59.99 with a 35% renewal rate, a 15% store fee, a 60/40 annual-to-monthly mix and 40% trial conversion.
- Monthly: $9.99 × 0.85 / 0.08 = $106.14 (12.5 months on average).
- Annual: $59.99 × 0.85 / 0.65 = $78.45 (about 1.54 yearly payments).
- Blended: 0.6 × $78.45 + 0.4 × $106.14 = $89.53 per paying subscriber.
- Per trial start: $89.53 × 0.40 = $35.81.
If you pay the standard App Store rate, a monthly subscriber's first 12 payments carry the 30% fee and later ones 15%, so the blended fee depends on how long people stay.
Use 30% for a cautious estimate when churn is high.
Notice that the monthly plan has the higher LTV in this example even though annual looks safer.
That is why plan mix tests deserve LTV-based scoring.
dub shifted its paywalls toward annual plans and reported +207% LTV, and Mojo showed only the yearly plan and gained 15 to 20 percentage points in yearly share.
Your own churn numbers decide which way it goes.
Our subscription pricing guide and the plan tests cover more of this.
Trials change the math as well. One new app that removed its free trial saw LTV per paying customer go from $35 to $40 to over $60 within a month, as reported by David Vargas.
Vahe Baghdasaryan reported that a $1.99 paid 30-day trial raised D90 ARPU from $2.23 to $2.89 across health and fitness apps.
These are vendor- and consultant-reported results, so check them against your own data.
LTV:CAC
LTV:CAC divides lifetime value by customer acquisition cost.
A ratio of 3:1 is the common target, as in Chargebee's glossary, meaning each customer brings back three times what it cost to win them.
Compare like with like. If your ad cost is per install, multiply LTV per trial start by your install-to-trial rate first.
In the example above, $35.81 per trial start at 3:1 means you can spend about $11.94 per trial start.
Watch payback time too. A healthy ratio with a 24-month payback can still run you out of cash, which is one reason annual plans paid upfront appeal to app teams.
For the metrics that feed into this, see our guides to subscription metrics and ARPU, or browse paywall tests that report LTV and proceeds per user.