Churned Contracted Users
The raw count of contracted users (seats or accounts) whose contracts were cancelled or not renewed during a period.
◆ Count
Formula
Built from
What it measures
The number of contracted seats or accounts your company lost in the period — a pure flow count of churn events, with no weighting by contract value. It captures only full cancellations and non-renewals; mid-contract seat reductions inside a still-active contract are downsell, not churn, and are excluded.
Why it matters
Churned Users is the raw attrition count that feeds your retention math. It is the numerator in user churn rate, the early-warning signal for renewal risk, and the unit product and CS teams rally around because a lost seat is concrete in a way a churn percentage is not. Lose contracted users and you lose revenue now (month-to-month deals) or carry forecasting risk into the next renewal window (annual deals). Almost every retention ratio you report sits on top of this count.
How to read it
Read it as a trend, not a snapshot — compare this period to the prior period and to your plan. Lower is better, but the absolute number only means something next to gross adds: hold it against New Contracted Users to see whether growth is outrunning attrition. Then ask where the churn sits. Is it spread evenly, or concentrated in one segment, cohort, or month? Concentrated churn in a single tier usually signals a product-fit or onboarding problem there, even if the company total looks calm. A rising slope over several periods is the real alarm.
What good looks like
Good
Churn count is stable or declining month-over-month, and comfortably below New Contracted Users so the base is growing net of attrition; losses are spread across the base rather than clustered.
Watch
A sustained month-over-month rise, or churn concentrated in one segment, cohort, or product tier — often the first sign of an onboarding, fit, or competitive problem.
Bad
Churn accelerating and outpacing new contracted users, so the contracted base is shrinking; broad-based losses point to product-market-fit or retention failure.
Watch-outs
- Reading the count as revenue impact. Ten churned seats at different contract values do not hit the P&L equally — track Churned MRR or Churned ARR alongside it for the economic picture.
- Counting downsizes as churn. Seats dropped inside a contract that stays live are downsell, not churn; folding them in inflates the number and hides the difference between a downgrade and a lost customer.
- Mixing cancellation-request date with contract end date. If a customer cancels mid-term but the contract runs to month-end, the two dates land in different periods — define which one triggers the count once and never switch.
- Including free-trial or freemium exits. Users with no contract carry no churn — only count seats covered by a paying or committed contract, or your trend becomes noise.
Worked example
Hypothetical
You start January with 5,000 active contracted users. During the month, 150 users are lost to cancellation or non-renewal. Churned Users for January is 150. If you also signed 300 new contracted users, your Net New Contracted Users for January is 300 - 150 = 150.
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 Users above.
- Churned Contracted Users Churned · Contracted book