Methodology · Shopify app churn

Define the opening cohort before calculating churn.

Marlo separates customer, subscription and recurring-revenue loss so a Shopify app team can reconcile the rate to merchants and events.

Opening cohort

The opening date is the UTC day immediately before the selected From date. Marlo includes positive-value, non-trial recurring subscriptions active on that day after the selected app, currency, customer-scope and exclusion filters are applied.

  1. 01Annual fixed charges are divided by 12 for MRR
  2. 02Currencies are reported separately
  3. 03Trials and zero-value plans are not paid opening subscriptions
  4. 04Confidently non-commercial and manually excluded stores stay out unless explicitly included
  5. 05A historical paying-only scope keeps merchants who paid during the selected period

Logo churn

Logo churn is the number of opening paying customers whose matched paid subscription fully ends with uninstall or subscription-cancel evidence and who have no paid subscription at the end of the period, divided by opening paying customers.

lost opening paying customers ÷ opening paying customers

Subscription churn

Subscription churn counts opening paid app subscriptions that end with uninstall or subscription-cancel evidence and remain inactive at period end.

canceled opening paid subscriptions ÷ opening paid subscriptions

Revenue churn

Revenue churn is recurring revenue lost from the opening subscription cohort before expansion. It includes full churn, frozen opening MRR and contraction. Each loss row shows its opening and closing MRR.

sum of max(0, opening MRR − closing MRR) ÷ opening MRR

Classification

  1. 01Churn: closing MRR is zero and a matching uninstall, subscription-cancel or scheduled-cancellation event exists
  2. 02Frozen: closing MRR is zero and the matching event is a Shopify billing hold
  3. 03Contraction: the subscription remains paid but closing MRR is lower
  4. 04Unclassified: snapshots show an opening loss but no matching lifecycle event supports a stronger label

Scheduled cancellation removes the non-renewing subscription from paying status and MRR from the date cancellation is recorded, even when paid access continues. Historical earnings remain unchanged. A later subscription lifecycle event can restore renewal; a plan replacement that leaves a paid closing subscription is not full churn.

Investigation threshold

Merchant attention lists, plan and source breakdowns, reasons and tenure summaries include losses at or above the greater of one unit of the selected currency or 0.1% of opening MRR, rounded up to the next cent. The opening MRR uses the selected app, currency, customer scope and exclusions. For example, $25,000 of opening MRR gives a $25 threshold.

This threshold focuses investigation. MRR, total revenue loss, subscription and logo churn counts, and churn rates still include every qualifying loss, including amounts below the threshold. The report also shows the count and value of losses below it.

Observed paid tenure

Tenure runs from the earliest positive, non-trial subscription start Marlo has observed for that merchant and app to the matching loss event. It is not a claim about activity before the available data.

Reasons and source

Cancellation-reason tables weight captured full-churn reasons by lost MRR, not only response count. Source views use an eligible affiliate attribution or retained first-party acquisition handoff. Raw acquisition evidence is retained for 180 days; absent or expired evidence stays unattributed.

Platform limits

  1. 01Shopify can cancel an app subscription after uninstall
  2. 02A frozen subscription is a billing hold, not necessarily voluntary churn
  3. 03An uninstall reason can indicate the merchant closed its Shopify store rather than rejected the app
  4. 04Partner sync freshness and lifecycle coverage affect the available evidence
  5. 05Marlo does not predict future churn in this version
  6. 06The seven-day brief is an in-app alert and sends no message

Use the method on your own data

Marlo keeps definitions beside the relevant report and detail views.

Start 7-day trial