Churned Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue
Monthly recurring revenue lost when contracted customers cancel entirely and their CMRR balance drops to zero during the period.
◆ Currency
Formula
Built from
What it measures
The sum of the prior-month CMRR for every contracted customer whose subscription fully ended and whose CMRR balance dropped to zero in the period. Partial downgrades, pauses, or usage dips that leave a non-zero recurring balance are excluded — only complete account cancellations count here.
Why it matters
You track Churned CMRR apart from Churned MRR because contracted customers are a distinct pool: longer commitments, higher ACV, and bigger dollar impact when they leave. Leadership uses it to forecast the contracted-revenue waterfall; teams use it to separate churn in the enterprise contract base (CMRR) from churn in the usage-based or month-to-month base (MRR). A spike in Churned CMRR is a red flag that your largest, most committed customers are walking.
How to read it
Read Churned CMRR as the dollar amount of contractual recurring revenue you lost to full cancellations this period, never as a single snapshot. Track it month-over-month and cohort-by-cohort, and always divide by Starting CMRR to see churn as a percentage. Then check Net-New CMRR: if it's offsetting the loss, Total CMRR can still grow even as churn rises — which is unsustainable once churn accelerates. Segment by cohort, ACV band, or vintage to spot whether your newest or oldest accounts are leaking fastest.
What good looks like
Good
Churned CMRR is stable or declining and sits below 5% of Starting CMRR per month — your contracted base is holding.
Watch
Churned CMRR is creeping up month-over-month or runs 5–10% of Starting CMRR — investigate churn patterns in the contract book.
Bad
Churned CMRR is accelerating or exceeds 10% of Starting CMRR monthly — contracted retention is eroding.
Watch-outs
- Counting downgrades as churn. A customer moving from $10K to $5K CMRR loses $5K to downsell, not churn — only a full cancellation to $0 is Churned CMRR.
- Confusing contracted churn with total churn. Churned CMRR tracks only customers with active contracts; Churned MRR sweeps in every month-to-month and usage-based cancellation. They are separate buckets.
- Reading dollars without logos. One $100K enterprise contract canceling spikes Churned CMRR; a small month-to-month account barely moves it. Always pair the dollar figure with logo count to separate dollar churn from volume churn.
- Not segmenting by cohort. New, renewing, and mature accounts churn at very different rates. Aggregate Churned CMRR masks the pattern — segment by deal vintage, ACV, or customer segment to catch early warnings.
Worked example
Hypothetical
You close September with 100 contracted customers on Total CMRR of $500K. In October two cancel: an $8K/month enterprise account and a $2K/month mid-market account. Churned CMRR for October is $8K + $2K = $10K. Against $500K Starting CMRR, that's a 2% monthly contracted churn rate — healthy.
Variants & windows
The same metric re-expressed by a mechanical transform — a trailing window, a growth rate, a per-unit scaling, or a book/segment cut. Each is computed from Churned Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue above.
- Churned CMRR Churned