Grade your growth, retention, churn, CAC payback and gross margin A to F against published 2025 benchmarks for your ARR band, then see the one metric to fix first.
Every threshold is anchored to a named source: High Alpha, SaaS Capital, Benchmarkit, ChartMogul and Bessemer. No invented benchmarks.
Sets the ARR band you are graded against.
Monthly input is compounded to a yearly figure, not multiplied by 12.
Revenue kept plus expansion from last year's customers. Excludes new customers.
Cancellations plus downgrades, no expansion offset. Revenue churn, not logo churn.
On total revenue. Include hosting, third-party APIs, support and DevOps in COGS.
out of 4.00
compounded from monthly
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Each bar is that metric's A-F scale for your ARR band, worst on the left, best on the right. The dot is you; ticks mark the published median and top quartile where a source gives one. Honey means A or B, navy C, coral D or F.
| Metric | Your value | Grade | Median | Top quartile | Source |
|---|
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The grading philosophy is simple: C means roughly the published median for your ARR band, B means above it, A means at or beyond the top quartile, D clearly below the median, F the danger zone.
Annual growth % = ((1 + monthly ÷ 100)12 − 1) × 100 Published benchmarks are year-on-year, so a monthly input is compounded, not multiplied by 12. Growing 5% a month is 79.6% a year, not 60%. The same logic runs in reverse for shrinking companies: minus 2% a month compounds to minus 21.5% a year.
One caution: companies with under three months of data have unstable growth rates, so treat an early grade as indicative. If you know your annual figure, use the toggle and enter it directly; no conversion is applied.
Annual gross churn ≈ 1 − (1 − monthly)12 Gross MRR churn is cancellations plus downgrades divided by start-of-month MRR, with no expansion offset. That matches ChartMogul's definition, which is what their benchmarks measure. It is not the same number as customer (logo) churn.
Founders routinely mix monthly and annual figures. 5% monthly churn means losing roughly 46% of your revenue base over a year, which is why the grade bands here are strict about small monthly differences.
NRR % = (start MRR + expansion − contraction − churn) ÷ start MRR × 100 NRR looks only at the customers you had twelve months ago and excludes new customers entirely. It can exceed 100% when expansion outruns the leak, and it is undefined if the starting cohort had no revenue, which is why the tool caps inputs at 200% and starts the scale at 50%.
CAC payback here follows Bessemer's convention: CAC divided by monthly gross profit per customer, not raw revenue. Enter 0 if you spend nothing on sales and marketing; the tool grades that A and notes it as fully organic rather than showing an infinity.
GPA = 0.25×growth + 0.25×NRR + 0.20×churn + 0.15×CAC + 0.15×margin Letter grades convert to points (A=4 down to F=0) and combine with those weights. Retention and growth carry the most weight because SaaS Capital's 2025 survey found the highest-NRR companies grow 83% faster than the population median.
The fix-first pick is your worst-graded metric, tie-broken by a leak-before-growth priority: gross churn, then NRR, then CAC payback, then growth, then margin. Plugging the leak makes every other improvement compound.
For CAC payback, the A, B and C bands follow Bessemer's published best (0-6 months), better (6-12) and good (12-18) tiers. Bessemer publishes only those three; the D band (up to 24 months, their stated enterprise ceiling) and F (beyond 24) extend the scale and are our extrapolation.
Similarly, the growth A-threshold under $1M ARR uses High Alpha's published ~300% top quartile. Above $1M ARR no top-quartile figure is published at band level, so the A-threshold is set at twice the band median, clearly an editorial choice rather than a sourced one.
Five independent datasets, each named inline. If a number is not in one of these sources, it is not used as a threshold.
High Alpha 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report, 800+ companies. AI-native medians run higher, around 100-110% at early stages. SaaS Capital's 2025 survey (14th annual, 1,000+ private B2B SaaS companies) found an all-sizes median of 25%.
| ARR band | Median growth | Top quartile |
|---|---|---|
| Under $1M ARR | 75% | ~300% (top quartile) |
| $1M - $5M ARR | 40% | not published |
| $5M - $20M ARR | 30% | not published |
| $20M - $50M ARR | 35% | not published |
| Over $50M ARR | 15% | not published |
High Alpha's published NRR figures from its 2024 SaaS Benchmarks Report. Benchmarkit's 2025 report puts the overall NRR median at 101% and GRR at 88%, down from 90% three years earlier. SaaS Capital's 2025 survey shows ~102% median and ~111% top quartile in the $25-50K ACV cohort.
| ARR band | Good | Great |
|---|---|---|
| Under $1M ARR | 100% | 110% |
| $1M - $5M ARR | 100% | 110% |
| $5M - $20M ARR | 105% | 120% |
| $20M - $50M ARR | 103% | 112% |
| Over $50M ARR | 102% | 107% |
ChartMogul platform data, 2024-2025. ChartMogul's 2025 retention report also found that even the top quartile of $15-30M+ ARR companies did not reach 100% NRR in 2024, so sub-100% NRR is now normal for SMB-focused SaaS.
| Stage | Median | Top quartile |
|---|---|---|
| Early stage (pre-$1M ARR) | 9.1% / month | 4.8% / month |
| Over $1M ARR | 5.3% / month | ~3.0% / month ($1-3M) |
| Over $15M ARR | 5.8% / month | 2.2% / month |
Bessemer Venture Partners: tiers from State of the Cloud 2023; segment targets (<12 months SMB, <18 mid-market, <24 enterprise) and the ~15-month average at $1-10M ARR from Scaling to $100 Million. Gross-margin adjusted throughout. Gross margin medians come from Benchmarkit 2025: 77% on total revenue, 81% subscription-only.
| Payback | Rating | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 0 - 6 months | Best | Bessemer, State of the Cloud 2023 |
| 6 - 12 months | Better | Bessemer, State of the Cloud 2023 |
| 12 - 18 months | Good | Bessemer, State of the Cloud 2023 |
| 18 - 24 months | Enterprise ceiling | Bessemer's segment targets; D band is our extension |
| Over 24 months | Danger zone | Our extension of the scale |
It depends heavily on stage. High Alpha's 2025 SaaS Benchmarks Report puts median year-on-year growth at roughly 75% for B2B SaaS under $1M ARR, 40% at $1-5M, and 30% at $5-20M, while SaaS Capital's 2025 survey of 1,000+ private companies found an all-sizes median of 25%. In monthly terms, 5% MoM compounds to about 80% a year, around the median for an early-stage company.
Benchmarkit's 2025 report puts median NRR at 101%, and SaaS Capital's 2025 survey shows top-quartile companies at around 111%. Stage matters too: High Alpha's own benchmark data rates 110% NRR as 'great' for companies under $5M ARR and 120% at $5-20M ARR. Anything above 110% is genuinely strong; above 120% is elite.
ChartMogul's benchmarks put median gross MRR churn at 9.1% per month for early-stage companies and 5.3% for companies past $1M ARR, with top-quartile performers at 4.8% and roughly 3.0% respectively. Because monthly churn compounds, 5% a month means losing roughly 46% of revenue over a year, so small monthly differences matter enormously.
Bessemer Venture Partners recommends under 12 months for SMB-focused products, under 18 months for mid-market, and under 24 months for enterprise, rating 0-6 months as best-in-class. The average at $1-10M ARR is about 15 months. Always calculate it on a gross-margin-adjusted basis, not raw revenue.
GRR measures how much recurring revenue you keep from existing customers after churn and downgrades, and can never exceed 100%: the 2025 Benchmarkit median is 88%. NRR adds expansion revenue (upgrades, seat growth) on top, so it can exceed 100%; the 2025 median is 101%. GRR shows how leaky the bucket is, NRR shows whether expansion outruns the leak.
Benchmarkit's 2025 data puts the median at 77% on total revenue and 81% on subscription revenue alone. Margins below 70% usually indicate heavy infrastructure, AI inference, or support costs sitting in COGS, and are increasingly common for AI-native products. Below 60%, investors start questioning whether the business has true software economics.
It says your revenue growth rate plus your profit margin should total at least 40%, for example 30% growth with 10% free cash flow margin. It is mainly used to judge companies at scale; for sub-$5M ARR businesses, growth, NRR, and CAC payback are more meaningful health checks, which is why this grader focuses on those. Try our Rule of 40 calculator if you are at scale.
Compare against published, stage-segmented datasets rather than headline averages: High Alpha's annual SaaS Benchmarks Report (800+ companies), SaaS Capital's private-company survey (1,000+ companies), Benchmarkit's performance metrics report, and ChartMogul's platform data for early-stage churn. Always match your ARR band and sales motion. An SMB self-serve product should not grade itself against enterprise NRR benchmarks.
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