Upsell Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue
Monthly recurring revenue added by existing customers who sign formal expansion contracts during the period.
◆ Currency
Formula
Built from
What it measures
The sum of monthly recurring revenue from every existing customer who signs a formal expansion contract in the period, each computed as the annual contract-value increase divided by the contract term in months. Only signed contracts count; informal tier upgrades or subscription-only expansions belong in Upsell MRR. It is the positive expansion line of the contracted-revenue (CMRR) waterfall.
Why it matters
Upsell CMRR isolates contracted expansion — the revenue you can count on because customers signed for it. You track it separately from Upsell MRR because a binding amendment is worth more than a self-serve tier bump: it locks the customer in at a higher value and lowers churn risk on that incremental revenue. CFOs and boards lean on it as near-certain future revenue when building the CMRR forecast, and sales and CS teams use it to judge expansion quality — are you closing formal contracts, or just nudging subscription customers up a tier they can drop next month?
How to read it
Read Upsell CMRR as a trend, month over month, against your Starting CMRR — it tells you how fast your existing base is committing to deeper, contracted relationships. Compare it to Upsell MRR: if subscription upsells are strong but contracted upsells are weak, your expansion is easily reversible, not locked in. Pair it with Downsell and Churned CMRR to see whether net contracted momentum is actually positive. Then segment by cohort, ACV tier, and industry — enterprise accounts tend to contract expansion earlier than SMB, and the mix tells you where durable growth is coming from.
What good looks like
Good
Upsell CMRR is stable or growing month-over-month, outpacing churn plus downsell CMRR, and driven by genuine expansion — new seats, modules, or usage rather than price-only lifts.
Watch
Upsell CMRR is declining sequentially, lumpy and dependent on one or two large renewals, or propped up mainly by list-price increases instead of real adoption.
Bad
Upsell CMRR is near zero or shrinking while your contracted base is flat — existing customers are not signing expansion deals, signaling weak product fit or no expansion motion in sales.
Watch-outs
- Counting subscription-only tier upgrades as Upsell CMRR. Only signed contracts count — if a customer moves up a self-serve tier without an amendment, that is Upsell MRR. Mixing them overstates how locked-in your expansion really is.
- Using signature date instead of activation date. A deal signed in December but effective January 1 belongs in January's Upsell CMRR — count when it goes live, not when it is inked.
- Forgetting to normalize multi-year contracts. A $120K three-year expansion is $40K/year, or about $3.3K/month — not $120K. Skipping the annualize-then-monthly step inflates the number and breaks the CMRR forecast.
- Conflating price increases with real expansion. If your only Upsell CMRR growth comes from list-price hikes rather than new seats, modules, or usage, you are masking stagnation and raising churn risk when a competitor undercuts you.
Worked example
Hypothetical
In March you have three existing contracted customers. Company A was contracted at $5K/month and renews into an upgraded deal at $8K/month — that is +$3K Upsell CMRR. Company B signs a contract amendment adding a module at $1.2K/year on a 1-year term — that is $1.2K ÷ 12 = $0.1K/month. Company C downgrades its renewal from $10K to $8K — that is Downsell CMRR, not Upsell, so it is excluded. March Upsell CMRR is $3K + $0.1K = $3.1K.
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 Upsell Contracted Monthly Recurring Revenue above.
- Expansion CMRR Expansion