Shopify app churn and LTV calculator

The formulas behind each result

The example column uses the calculator's starting values, made up to show the arithmetic: 200 paying stores at the start of the month, 9 that stopped paying, an ARPU of 29 US dollars, and Shopify's 0% rate.

ARPU is gross here: your MRR, the monthly price of your active subscriptions, divided by your number of paying stores, before Shopify takes anything. An annual plan counts as its price divided by twelve. Stores on a free trial are not paying yet, so they stay out of both store counts.

Count departures only among the stores that were paying on the first day of the month. A store that subscribes and leaves within the same month is in neither number, which keeps the rate between 0% and 100%.

The lifetime follows from the churn: if every paying store has the same chance of leaving each month, it stays on average 1 ÷ churn months. The last line is the monthly revenue of the stores that left, times twelve. It assumes all of them would have stayed a full year, so it is an upper bound.

Where LTV = ARPU ÷ churn breaks down

The formula is an approximation: it treats churn and ARPU as constant over a store's whole life. Read its result as an order of magnitude.

• Churn that changes with age. If your cohorts show stores leaving faster in their first months than later, a month that mixes new and old stores gives one average rate that fits neither group.
• Small numbers. Out of 200 stores, one departure more or less moves churn by half a point: 8 departures give a gross LTV of $725, 10 give $580. Average three to six months before you trust the result.
• Plan changes and usage. Upgrades, downgrades and usage charges change what a store pays over time. The calculator leaves them out.
• Time. A dollar earned in two years counts the same as a dollar today, because the formula does not discount future revenue.
• Costs. Net LTV removes what Shopify keeps, not your hosting, support or acquisition costs. It is revenue, not profit.

What counts as a departure for a Shopify app

A departure is a store that was paying at the start of the month and is no longer paying at the end: it uninstalled your app, its subscription was cancelled with no new paid plan, or Shopify froze its charge and it stayed frozen. The Partner API records each case as an app event (version 2026-10):

Store closures need a decision. When a merchant schedules the closure of their Shopify store, Shopify now uninstalls their apps once the closure takes effect, at the end of the store's current paid billing cycle, with the uninstall reason scheduled_cancellation. A Shopify staff member described this as a recent change on Shopify's developer forum on April 7, 2026, and detailed the timing on April 27, 2026. These stores did stop paying you, so they belong in the calculator, whose LTV is about money. When you judge your app, set them apart: the same staff member suggested filtering them out of churn metrics, since these merchants are leaving Shopify rather than your app.

A trial that ends without a first payment is a missed conversion, not a departure. A paused store is not a departure either, as long as it keeps your app: Shopify's Help Center says all apps remain active after a merchant pauses their store, and advises merchants to consider uninstalling apps with recurring charges, so a pause can reach you as an ordinary uninstall.

The Partner API's historical events query, documented from version 2026-07, also returns SUBSCRIPTION_CANCELLATION_SCHEDULED, which Shopify's page does not describe further as of October 20, 2026. Count the store in the month it actually stops paying.

Since April 23, 2026 (announced on April 29), merchants must pick a reason before they uninstall. How to read those reasons: why merchants uninstall your Shopify app. Store churn and revenue churn side by side: how to measure churn for a Shopify app.

What Shopify keeps, and which rate to pick

Net LTV is 97.1% of gross LTV at Shopify's 0% rate and 82.1% at 15%. Shopify takes 0% on your first 1,000,000 US dollars of lifetime gross app revenue, counted from January 1, 2025, and 15% above it. A 2.9% processing fee applies to all billing, charged separately from the revenue share. Developers who earned 20 million US dollars or more through the Shopify App Store in the prior calendar year, or whose company's gross revenue passes Shopify's 100 million US dollar threshold, pay 15% from the first dollar.

The million is a lifetime amount that does not reset each year. Since an LTV spreads over many months, pick 15% if you expect to pass the million while today's new subscribers are still paying. Shopify calculates its share on gross sales and says refunds aren't taken into account. To see month by month what Shopify keeps, use the Shopify app revenue share calculator.

Is 5% monthly churn good for a Shopify app?

There is no reliable benchmark to compare it with. As of October 20, 2026, we found none from Shopify, and the churn figures we found in blog posts about Shopify apps give no dataset, sample size or method. What 5% means can be computed, though: a paying store stays 20 months on average, and after a year about 54% of a starting group is still paying.

This table is arithmetic under constant churn, not a benchmark. It also shows why monthly churn does not multiply by twelve: the share still paying after a year is (1 − monthly churn) to the power of 12, so 5% a month loses about 46% of a group in a year, not 60%.

Who your merchants are matters as much as the rate. On Shopify's developer forum, on June 3, 2025, a Shopify staff member wrote that an app in a category likely to benefit merchants who are just starting their store will see churn often, a much bigger factor than for apps aimed at established brands, and that billing should reflect it. Compare your churn with your own past months and cohorts rather than with a number from another app.

Read your real numbers

Shopify's store counts include stores that do not pay you, so build the three inputs from your app's history:

1. Paying stores at the start of the month: replay each store's subscription events and count the stores with an active paid charge on the first day. The Partner Dashboard's Merchants with your app count is larger, because it includes stores on a trial plan, staff stores and development stores.
2. Stores that stopped paying: among those, count the ones with no active paid charge on the last day, following the rules above.
3. ARPU: your MRR on the first day, divided by those paying stores. How to calculate MRR for a Shopify app explains the replay and its traps, such as currencies, trials and frozen stores.
4. Repeat over three to six months, use the average churn, and check it against your install cohorts, as the Shopify app churn guide explains.

To weigh net LTV against what an App Store ad costs you per paying store, use the Shopify App Store ads calculator.

Luseri reads your app's history from the Partner API, with read-only access to your Partner account: it computes retention by install cohort and lists the reasons merchants gave when they left.