Retention Rate

Retention Rate is the percentage of users who continue to use a product or service over a specified period of time. It helps measure user satisfaction, engagement, and loyalty. High retention rates indicate that users find value in the product, while low rates may point to issues like poor user experience or unmet needs.

Retention rate is ultimately the metric that determines whether your SaaS business is healthy. A product with 95% monthly retention doubles in value through compounding; one with 90% retention loses half its user base in a year. For product teams, improving retention from 80% to 85% is worth far more than doubling acquisition, because retained users cost nothing to keep. Retention improvements should almost always take priority over growth spending.

Notion tracks 'weekly active users' cohort retention as their core product metric — their team has found that users who use Notion at least once per week for the first month have dramatically higher 12-month retention, leading them to design onboarding specifically to establish a weekly usage habit in the first 30 days.