CUROBI
Install free
Glossary

Churn

Also known as: Subscription churn, Churn rate

Churn is the rate at which subscribers cancel or lapse over a given period — the share of recurring customers a business loses — and it is the single most important number in a subscription business because retained revenue compounds while churned revenue must be re-acquired.

Churn comes in two flavors. Voluntary churn is a customer actively choosing to cancel — often because of price, product piling up between deliveries, or wanting more variety. Involuntary churn is a customer lost to a failed payment they never chose to trigger. A healthy subscription program attacks both.

The most effective single lever against voluntary churn is letting customers skip or reschedule instead of cancel, because most people who cancel are simply over-supplied for the moment, not gone for good. Variety (build-your-own and rotating curated boxes) and save flows help too. Involuntary churn is handled by dunning.

Curobi is built to counter each driver: a self-service portal to skip or change frequency, build-your-own and rotating curated boxes for variety, cancellation save flows that offer a pause instead of a cancel, and automatic dunning for failed payments.

Related terms

  • Dunning — Dunning is the automated process of recovering a failed subscription payment — retrying the declined charge on a schedule and prompting the customer to update their payment method — so a recoverable card failure doesn't silently cancel the subscriber.
  • Cancellation Save Flow — A cancellation save flow is the sequence a subscriber sees when they try to cancel — presenting an alternative such as pausing, skipping a delivery, changing frequency, or a retention offer — designed to keep customers who would otherwise leave over a fixable, temporary reason.
  • Monthly Recurring Revenue — Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) is the predictable revenue a subscription business expects to collect each month from its active subscriptions, normalized to a monthly figure — the core measure of the size and growth of recurring revenue.
  • Build-Your-Own Box — A build-your-own box (BYOB) is a subscription in which the customer assembles their own recurring box from a set of eligible products each cycle — for example choosing which coffee bags go in this month's shipment — usually within a per-item limit and before a billing cutoff.

← All subscription commerce terms