A practical reference from 4NLab
SaaS metrics, explained and calculated
Know what your SaaS numbers mean.
Run the calculation, check the assumptions behind it, and see what the result can and can’t tell you. 26 practical guides, 17 free calculators, and 91 glossary definitions.
Explore the glossary →Two tools for your own numbers
Choose the SaaS metrics to track
Describe your company in a sentence or two; get the five or six metrics that matter for your stage, with the reason for each.
Check your metric definition
Paste how your team calculates MRR, churn, NRR or CAC; see common definition mistakes flagged, with links to the method.
Start with the question you need to answer
Understand recurring revenue
Put monthly and annual contracts on the same footing, keep run rate apart from recognized revenue, and explain every change in what customers pay.
Find what retention is hiding
Customers leaving, revenue lost, and expansion are three different numbers. Track the same cohort through all three.
Test acquisition economics
Match costs to the customers they actually bought, work from gross margin, and question the assumptions inside any lifetime value estimate.
Plan cash and growth
Turn cash and burn into months of runway, check what sales spend returns, and weigh growth against a profit measure you have actually defined.
Resolve a common mix-up
Calculate with your numbers
ARR Calculator
ARR is your current recurring subscription base, stated on an annual scale.
Burn Multiple Calculator
Burn multiple compares the cash you burned with the recurring revenue you added over the same period.
CAC Calculator
CAC turns acquisition spending into a cost per new paying account.
CAC Payback Period Calculator
How long does a new customer take to earn back what you spent to win them? CAC payback answers that in months of gross profit, and it tells you how much acquisition growth your cash plan can carry.
Customer Churn Calculator
Customer churn counts how many accounts you lost from a fixed starting customer base.
Free Cash Flow Calculator
Free cash flow is the operating cash left after capital expenditures.
GRR Calculator
Gross revenue retention shows only what you lost from an existing revenue base.
LTV Calculator
LTV is an estimate, and it’s only as good as the model behind it.
LTV to CAC Ratio Calculator
LTV/CAC sets modeled customer value against what it cost to acquire the customer.
MRR Calculator
MRR is your recurring revenue on a given date, stated per month.
NRR Calculator
Net revenue retention takes a starting group of customers and asks what happened to their recurring revenue.
Revenue Multiple Calculator
A revenue multiple means nothing until you know what sits on top and what sits underneath.
Rule of 40 Calculator
The Rule of 40 adds your revenue growth rate to your profit margin.
Runway Calculator
Runway tells you how long your cash lasts at the current burn.
SaaS Magic Number Calculator
The SaaS Magic Number compares annualized quarterly revenue growth with the previous quarter’s sales and marketing expense.
TCV Calculator
TCV is the total committed over a contract’s full term.
Valuation Calculator
This calculator is a scenario tool.
Make the assumptions visible
Every guide has an original hypothetical scenario, the usual mistakes, and links to sources for the method. Where conventions differ, the guide says so. No single benchmark is treated as a universal target.