Paywall revenue calculator

Enter your monthly website visitors, the share of them you expect to subscribe, your monthly subscription price and your expected monthly churn rate. The projection updates live as you drag the sliders, building a subscriber base month by month over the first year. Everything runs in your browser, and the figures are stored in the page URL so you can share a scenario with colleagues.

The model compounds a steady stream of new subscribers against monthly churn:

• New subscribers each month = monthly visitors × conversion rate.
• Subscribers in a given month = last month's subscribers, minus churn, plus the new subscribers acquired that month. The base starts at zero.
• MRR (monthly recurring revenue) = subscribers × price per month.
• ARR (annual recurring revenue) = month-12 MRR × 12.
• Year-1 revenue = the sum of MRR across months 1 to 12, which is lower than ARR because the base is still building.

Prices are treated as net of VAT and payment fees, and the model assumes a constant acquisition rate and churn rate throughout the year.

Take 100,000 monthly visitors converting at 0.5%. That is 500 new subscribers every month. At £5 a month with 4% monthly churn, the base compounds to 4,841 subscribers by month 12.

• Month-12 MRR: £24,206
• Annual recurring revenue: £290,468
• Year-1 revenue collected: £169,065

Left to run at the same acquisition and churn rates, that base tends toward a ceiling of roughly 500 ÷ 4% = 12,500 subscribers, or about £62,500 MRR.

Metered paywalls typically convert a fraction of a percent of total visitors, rising to low single digits for niche or professional titles where the audience is already highly qualified. Hard paywalls convert fewer visitors, but those who do subscribe are higher-intent readers who usually retain better. Monthly churn for consumer media subscriptions commonly sits in the mid-single digits, with annual plans churning far less than monthly ones.

Sources

• WAN-IFRA — World Press Trends and reader revenue research
• State of Digital Publishing — paywall conversion benchmarks
• Recurly — subscription churn benchmarks by industry

Benchmarks vary widely by market, content type and pricing. Replace them with your own analytics and billing data as soon as you have it.