A question to web-application providers: what percentage of your clients quit your service every month? is the rate different for free accounts compared to paying accounts?<p>p.s. Any links to some stats?
Here are my numbers for S3stat. We don't have free accounts, though we do have a 30 day trial.<p><pre><code> Visit to trial conversion: 3%
Trial to paid conversion: 26%
Average subscription length: 11.5 months
Average cancels per month: 2%
</code></pre>
Over time, those last two numbers keep getting better, since there's more time passed for our first loyal customers to inflate the average subscription length, and there's more people on board to lessen the impact of a few people cancelling.<p>It's worth noting that you only need to calculate one of those last two numbers to know the expected lifetime value of a visit to your site. Until you asked the question, I had never actually calculated my churn rate as a percentage of active users.
No public stats I can personally provide. But I have seen it vary wildly depending on the type of service. Businesses are generally slower to adopt a new service/tool, and once they are locked in can be apprehensive for change. Consumers can change on a whim if something better comes along.<p>Here are some interesting stats I found for Evernote: <a href="http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/video-evernote-ceo-phil-libin-shares-revenue-stats-and-how-to-make-freemium-work/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2010/05/28/video-evernote-ceo-phil-lib...</a><p>Evernote has been pretty open in their stats over the course of their existence.
Constant Contact is a public company, there for they share stats in their annual report <a href="http://investor.constantcontact.com/common/download/download.cfm?companyid=CTCT&fileid=368991&filekey=8D782BD5-08BC-4DF8-9DA2-A5698A49E40B&filename=CTCT_09AR_4.26.10.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://investor.constantcontact.com/common/download/download...</a><p>Some key stats. Their churn is ~2.5% and their cost of acquiring customer is (whopping!) $370<p>PS: planning to write a post analyzing all such open stats. Do you know any other public Internet companies?
This might help too: for really crap services (say, weightloss or the like), where people sign up and then pretty much never use the service, a typical average churn rate is 3 months. ie. it takes people 3 months on average to unsubscribe from a service they don't use.
Is there an equivalent or similar metric for non-subscription commerce sites? I operate one, and I'm struggling to find good references on the best way to determine I've 'lost' a customer.