Churned Live Annual Recurring Revenue
The annualized recurring revenue lost when customers fully cancel their actively billing (live) subscriptions in a period, calculated as the period's Churned Live MRR times 12.
◆ Currency
Formula
Built from
What it measures
The annualized value of recurring revenue removed from the live base when customers cancel an actively billing subscription outright. Only accounts that drop from paying to $0 recurring count — partial downgrades that leave a customer still paying belong to Downsell ARR, and cancellations of signed-but-not-yet-activated contracts belong to Churned CARR. The period's Churned Live MRR is annualized (×12) to express the run-rate revenue impact of churn in the live, billing book.
Why it matters
Churned Live ARR isolates the revenue damage from cancellations of contracts that were actually billing — the dollars leaving your live base, not your forward bookings. Leadership uses it to size the retention leak in active business and to forecast cash impact: unlike Churned CARR (which also removes signed-but-not-yet-live contracts), Churned Live ARR speaks directly to revenue that was already being recognized. It is the negative term that drags down Live ARR and Net New Live ARR, the mirror image of New Live ARR's growth, and the foundation under gross revenue retention and cash-generation forecasts.
How to read it
Read Churned Live ARR as a trend, never a single snapshot, and always next to its rate. A high dollar figure alone does not signal a churn crisis — one large account leaving can spike it while the broader base holds. Normalize against starting Live ARR to get your gross revenue churn (Churned Live ARR ÷ Starting Live ARR), then stack it against New Live ARR and Upsell Live ARR: if churn is climbing while new and expansion stall, growth will decelerate or reverse. Break it by cohort, segment, and account size to find where the leak concentrates — if new customers churn faster than mature ones, fix onboarding; if mature ones churn, you have a value-delivery problem.
What good looks like
Good
Churned Live ARR stays below 10% of opening Live ARR annually, with no single large account driving the number and gross revenue retention above 90% — a sign of durable active-base retention.
Watch
Churned Live ARR runs 10–20% of opening Live ARR, or is increasingly concentrated in a handful of high-ACV accounts; drill into cohort and segment retention to isolate where churn is accelerating.
Bad
Churned Live ARR exceeds 20% of opening Live ARR, eroding the live base faster than new and expansion revenue can replace it; your active customer base is shrinking or highly unstable.
Watch-outs
- Confusing Churned Live ARR with Churned CARR. Live covers only actively billing subscriptions; CARR also includes cancellations of signed-but-not-yet-activated contracts. A large CARR-to-Live gap hides future revenue loss already baked into your onboarding pipeline.
- Treating dollars as the whole story. $500K of Churned Live ARR looks alarming on a $2M base (25% churn) but trivial at $20M (2.5% churn). Always compute gross revenue churn = Churned Live ARR ÷ Starting Live ARR to read the rate alongside the dollars.
- Including downgrades as churn. A customer dropping from $10K to $5K is contraction (Downsell ARR), not churn — count only full cancellations that reach $0, or you will double-count against the downsell line.
- Re-annualizing an already-annualized figure. Churned Live ARR annualizes a single period's Churned Live MRR (×12). Multiplying a trailing-twelve-month total of churned MRR by 12 again double-counts and vastly overstates the run-rate.
Worked example
Hypothetical
In March, customers whose live subscriptions were billing $50K of recurring revenue per month cancel outright. That $50K of Churned Live MRR annualizes to $600K of Churned Live ARR — the run-rate revenue you would forfeit over a year if March's live-churn pace held.