Subscription revenue target planner

Pick whether your goal is a recurring-revenue figure or a subscriber count, then enter the target, the timeframe you have, your current subscriber base, your monthly churn rate and your subscription price. The planner works backwards and tells you how many gross new subscribers you need every month to land on the goal. Add your monthly website visitors and it also shows the visitor-to-subscriber conversion rate that implies. Every input is stored in the URL, so you can share a scenario with your team.

If your goal is annual recurring revenue, the planner first converts it into subscribers: target subscribers = target ARR ÷ (price × 12). If your goal is already a subscriber count, that number is used directly.

It then solves for the constant number of gross new subscribers per month, G, that gets you from today's base to the target. Each month is simulated as subscribers = previous × (1 − churn) + G, and a numeric search narrows G until the final month lands on your target. Net new per month is simply the difference between the target and your current base divided by the timeframe — useful context, but it ignores the subscribers churn takes away, which is why the gross figure is always higher.

If your current base would still exceed the target even with no new sign-ups at all, the planner says so rather than inventing an acquisition number.

Most subscription plans start in the wrong place: a marketing activity, a campaign, or a vague ambition to "grow the base". Planning backwards flips that. You begin with the revenue the business actually needs, translate it into a subscriber count at your real price, and only then ask what monthly acquisition rate that demands.

The number that matters is gross new subscribers per month — the people who must sign up, not the net change in your base. Net growth is what is left after churn has taken its cut, so a plan built on net numbers will always under-resource acquisition. If the gross figure the planner returns is far beyond what you have ever achieved in a month, the plan is not realistic yet and something has to change: a longer timeframe, a higher price, a lower churn rate, or more traffic feeding the top of the funnel.

Treat the output as a budget line as much as a growth target. Once you know you need, say, 300 sign-ups a month, you can work out what that costs in acquisition spend and whether the lifetime value of those subscribers justifies it.

Churn is the quiet tax on every subscription target. At 5% monthly churn, a base of 3,000 subscribers loses 150 people every month — so before a single net new subscriber is added, you need 150 sign-ups simply to stand still. The larger your base grows, the bigger that replacement number becomes, which is why growth plans that ignore churn fall apart in the second half of the year.

Because of that compounding, reducing churn is usually the cheapest lever available. Cutting monthly churn from 5% to 3% on a 3,000-subscriber base saves 60 cancellations a month, and that saving grows in step with the base. Try it in the planner: lower the churn rate and watch the gross new subscribers per month fall, often by more than a price rise would achieve.

Annual plans, engaged onboarding, failed-payment recovery and clear renewal communications all pull churn down. Mocono handles the billing and subscriber-management side of that automatically, with Stripe as the underlying payment rail.