Subscription

Direct-to-consumer subscriptions — apps, media, memberships. Trial-to-paid conversion and churn define the model; annual-plan retention is the LTV backbone. It is the best-benchmarked consumer space (RevenueCat tracks ~75k apps). Monetization is thin per user, so retention and ARPU compound everything.

Consumer subscription is a retention business. The unit economics are simple in structure: a user pays a recurring fee, and the business captures that fee minus churn across the customer's lifetime. Because per-user ARPU is modest relative to B2B SaaS, even small improvements to churn or conversion have outsized compound effects on LTV — which is why the model rewards relentless focus on activation and early engagement.

Trial and the Early Retention Curve

Free-trial conversion — and whether the opt-in or opt-out mechanic is used — sets the initial funnel. Opt-out trials convert at higher rates but attract less intentional subscribers, leading to elevated early churn. D1, D7, and D30 retention curves reveal the shape of that early drop-off: a D1 cliff signals an onboarding failure, while a slow bleed from D7 to D30 often points to product-market fit questions. Monthly churn rate is the operational metric; annual churn in the first year (year-1 retention) is the strategic one, because the first renewal is where most subscriber value is either locked in or lost.

Monetization and Stickiness

DAU/MAU stickiness measures whether subscribers are actually using what they pay for — low stickiness predicts passive cancellations at renewal. ARPU and revenue per install track monetization density across the user base. With platforms like RevenueCat indexing tens of thousands of apps, consumer subscription is among the best-benchmarked categories in software; the challenge is not data availability but knowing which cohort shapes and retention curves to target for a specific app genre and price point.