Enter one month of MRR movements and get the waterfall chart, net-new MRR, quick ratio and a plain-English read on where your growth really came from. Chain up to 12 months.
From brand-new customers.
Upgrades, seats, add-ons.
Returning customers. Leave at 0 if you fold these into New.
Downgrades and removed seats.
Full cancellations.
From starting to ending MRR, one movement at a time.
Enter your movements to see the verdict.
Each month starts where the previous one ended.
| Month | Starting MRR | Net-new MRR | Ending MRR | Growth | Quick ratio |
|---|
Every change in MRR comes from one of five movements. New MRR arrives with first-time customers. Expansion comes from upgrades, extra seats and add-ons. Reactivation is customers who cancelled and came back. Contraction is downgrades, and churned MRR is full cancellations.
The waterfall walks from starting MRR to ending MRR through each movement in turn. That is why it beats a single net growth number: two companies can post identical net-new MRR while one compounds healthily and the other refills a leaky bucket every month.
Reactivation is optional. Stripe does not split it out natively, so if you do not track it separately, fold reactivated subscriptions into New MRR and leave the field at zero. The quick ratio here includes reactivation in the numerator, the same variant ChartMogul uses.
Starting MRR $42,000. New $4,800, expansion $1,900, reactivation $350, contraction $1,150, churned $2,600.
Verdict: growth treadmill. Only $1.88 added per $1 lost, well below the 4.0 benchmark, and cancellations make up 69% of losses, so retention is the highest-leverage fix.
New + Expansion + Reactivation − Contraction − Churned Enter every movement as a positive number; the builder applies the signs. Net-new MRR can be negative — that is a shrinking month.
Starting MRR + Net-new MRR In multi-month mode, each month's ending MRR becomes the next month's starting MRR. If losses exceed everything that exists, the tool clamps ending MRR at zero and warns you.
Net-new MRR ÷ Starting MRR × 100 Shows n/a when starting MRR is zero rather than an infinite percentage.
(New + Expansion + Reactivation) ÷ (Churned + Contraction) Shows ∞ when losses are zero. Mamoon Hamid's original definition uses only new + expansion in the numerator; including reactivation is the common modern variant, and ChartMogul does the same.
(Churned + Contraction) ÷ Starting MRR × 100 Raw revenue leakage before any offset from expansion. n/a when starting MRR is zero.
(Churned + Contraction − Expansion − Reactivation) ÷ Starting MRR × 100 A negative result means net negative churn: expansion outweighs all losses. The verdict flags this as a strength.
Expansion ÷ (New + Expansion + Reactivation) × 100 We divide by gross additions rather than net-new MRR, which can exceed 100% or go negative in a bad month. ChartMogul's benchmark uses net-new MRR as the denominator, so compare with care.
The verdict bands come from named, dated sources, not vibes. The quick ratio thresholds follow Mamoon Hamid's "Numbers that Actually Matter" talk at SaaStr Annual (2017); the mix and growth references below are from 2025 datasets.
Mamoon Hamid (Social Capital, now Kleiner Perkins), SaaStr Annual, 2017. Ratios approaching 2 or 1 signal a leaky bucket.
| Quick ratio | State | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| 4.0 or higher | Efficient growth | You add at least $4 of new and expansion MRR for every $1 lost. Hamid's "investable" threshold. |
| 2.0 – 3.9 | Growing but leaky | Real growth, but a meaningful share of it is going straight back out through churn and downgrades. |
| 1.0 – 1.9 | Growth treadmill | Acquisition is mostly replacing lost revenue rather than compounding. Hamid called this the leaky bucket zone. |
| Below 1.0 | Shrinking | You lose more MRR than you add. Fix retention before spending more on growth. |
Among SaaS outliers that scaled from $1M to $20M ARR, expansion rose from 15.4% of net-new MRR at $1M ARR to 34.7% at $20M ARR, and 86% of outliers improved their expansion share by more than 10% along the way. Source: ChartMogul, Growth Levers: The Path from $1M to $20M ARR (2025).
Reactivation contributed 1.7% of net-new MRR at $1M ARR and 3.8% at $20M ARR among the same outlier companies. Worth tracking separately once win-back campaigns start working. Source: ChartMogul, Growth Levers (2025).
The median private B2B SaaS company grew 25% year over year, down from 30% in 2023, and 6.9% of companies reported flat or negative growth. That median works out to roughly 1.9% compounded per month. Source: SaaS Capital, 14th annual survey of 1,000+ private B2B SaaS companies (2025).
Almost half of software startups eventually reach $1M ARR, roughly one in ten reach $10M, and only about one in fifty reach $25M within 10 years. Months of positive net-new MRR are what separate the survivors. Source: ChartMogul, Against the Odds: The 2025 SaaS Growth Report (2025).
An MRR waterfall (sometimes called an MRR bridge) is a chart that walks from one month's starting MRR to its ending MRR by showing each movement in between: new business, expansion, reactivation, contraction and churn. Instead of one net number, it shows exactly which levers drove growth or decline. Finance teams and investors use it because two companies with identical net growth can have completely different underlying health.
Net-new MRR = new MRR + expansion MRR + reactivation MRR − contraction MRR − churned MRR. It is the total change in your recurring revenue for the month, and adding it to your starting MRR gives your ending MRR. A negative net-new MRR means your subscription base shrank that month.
A quick ratio of 4 or above is the widely cited benchmark, popularised by investor Mamoon Hamid of Social Capital: for every $1 of MRR lost to churn and downgrades, you add $4 in new and expansion MRR. Between 1 and 4 means you are growing but leaking revenue, and below 1 means you are shrinking. Early-stage companies often run below 4 — the trend matters as much as the level. Our quick ratio calculator goes deeper on this one metric.
Churned MRR is revenue lost when a customer cancels entirely; contraction MRR is revenue lost when a customer stays but pays less — a downgrade, fewer seats, a removed add-on or a discount. Separating them matters because they need different fixes: churn is a retention problem, contraction is often a packaging or pricing problem.
Net negative churn (or net negative MRR churn) happens when expansion and reactivation revenue from existing customers exceeds everything lost to churn and contraction in the same period. It means your MRR would grow even with zero new customers. It is one of the strongest signals of product-market fit and a major driver of efficient growth at scale.
It rises with scale. ChartMogul's Growth Levers report (2025) found expansion made up 15.4% of net-new MRR for outlier companies at $1M ARR, growing to 34.7% by $20M ARR. If nearly all of your growth comes from new logos, you are likely under-monetising existing customers; if it is almost all expansion, new-customer acquisition may be stalling.
Stripe's built-in Billing analytics reports MRR but does not give a clean monthly split of new, expansion, contraction, churned and reactivation movements out of the box. You can approximate them from subscription created, updated and cancelled events, or use a subscription analytics tool that normalises Stripe data into MRR movements automatically. Mowt does exactly this in real time from your Stripe account.
There is no single number — it depends heavily on stage. As a reference point, SaaS Capital's 2025 survey of 1,000+ private B2B SaaS companies found median annual growth of 25%, which works out to roughly 1.9% compounded per month. Early-stage startups chasing venture-scale outcomes target far higher rates. Watch the composition too: growth driven by a high quick ratio is worth more than the same growth achieved while haemorrhaging churn.
Connect your Stripe account and see your real MRR, churn, and LTV in real time — on desktop and mobile.
No credit card required · Connect Stripe in 1 click
No credit card required. Connect Stripe in 1 click.
We're building iOS and Android apps that'll bring your metrics everywhere.
Our mobile apps are currently in active development. Follow us on social media for updates and be the first to know when they launch.