How is MAU calculated?

MAU grows by the simple recurrence: MAU(t) = MAU(t-1) + new_users(t) - churned_users(t). Each period starts from the previous period's ending count, adds newly acquired users, and subtracts the users who became inactive that month.

What is a good DAU/MAU ratio?

DAU/MAU (stickiness) measures how many of your monthly users return on any given day. Consumer social apps like WhatsApp exceed 50%. Most SaaS tools sit between 10-20%. A ratio above 20% is generally considered strong for a productivity product; below 10% signals an engagement problem worth investigating.

What is the difference between churn rate and 30-day retention?

Churn rate is the percentage of the prior month's users who did not return: churn = lost_users / prior_MAU. The 30-day retention shown here is the complement from the MAU perspective: retention = (MAU - new_users_this_month) / prior_MAU. If churn is 5%, retention is 95% (assuming no new users are counted as retained).

Can I use this for DAU or WAU forecasting?

The calculator focuses on MAU as the primary metric and derives DAU and WAU from the ratios you enter. To forecast DAU directly, run the same new/lost logic with a shorter cadence, or apply your current DAU/MAU ratio to the projected MAU to estimate future DAU.

What counts as an active user?

The definition of "active" is product-specific. Common conventions are any login, any key action (message sent, transaction made, page viewed for more than N seconds), or any session. You should apply the same definition consistently across periods for meaningful MAU figures. This calculator is definition-agnostic — it works with whatever counts your analytics platform produces.

How do I reduce churn to improve MAU growth?

Reducing churn has a compounding effect: a 2% monthly churn rate means you lose roughly 22% of your user base per year, while 5% monthly churn wipes out more than 46%. Tactics that consistently move the needle include improving onboarding (reaching first value in under 5 minutes), sending triggered re-engagement emails within 3 days of inactivity, and adding habit-forming features that give users a daily reason to return.

Monthly Active Users (MAU) Calculator

Monthly Active Users (MAU) is the cornerstone engagement metric for virtually every digital product — from consumer apps and SaaS platforms to marketplaces and games. This calculator lets you model MAU growth across multiple months, instantly surfacing churn rate, user growth rate, 30-day retention, and the all-important DAU/MAU stickiness ratio, all from inputs your analytics dashboard already gives you.

How it works

The calculator implements the standard MAU recurrence formula and a set of derived engagement metrics:

Core MAU formula:

MAU(t) = MAU(t-1) + new_users(t) - churned_users(t)

Starting from your baseline, the tool walks forward through each period you define. For every month it computes:

End-of-month MAU — the running total after acquisitions and churn
Net new users — new minus churned (can be negative if churn exceeds acquisition)
Monthly churn rate — churned_users / prior_MAU, expressed as a percentage
Monthly growth rate — (MAU_current - MAU_prior) / MAU_prior
30-day retention — (MAU - new_users_this_month) / prior_MAU — the share of last month’s users who are still active

From your DAU and WAU inputs, the tool also calculates:

DAU/MAU ratio (stickiness) — the single most cited product-health metric in consumer tech
WAU/MAU ratio — a softer stickiness signal, useful for products with a natural weekly cadence

Worked example

Suppose a B2B SaaS product starts the quarter with 10,000 MAU, 2,500 DAU and 5,500 WAU.

Period	New users	Churned	End MAU	Churn %	Growth %
Month 1	2,000	300	11,700	3.0%	+17.0%
Month 2	2,500	350	13,850	3.0%	+18.4%
Month 3	3,000	400	16,450	2.9%	+18.8%

At the end of Month 3, the DAU/MAU ratio is 2,500 / 16,450 = 15.2% (fair — in the average SaaS range). The 30-day retention from Month 2 to Month 3 is (16,450 - 3,000) / 13,850 = 97.1%, reflecting low churn. Net new users grew each month, which is a healthy growth signal.

Formula note

Churn rate measures the fraction of existing users lost, not total users: churn = lost / prior_MAU. A 5% churn rate on a 10,000 MAU product costs 500 users per month and, left unchecked, halves the base in roughly 13 months even with zero acquisition spend. The compounding logic makes reducing churn almost always higher-leverage than increasing acquisition at the same cost.

DAU/MAU is calculated as DAU / MAU and is bounded between 0 and 1 (or 0–100%). Facebook historically quoted ~50–65%, which is considered exceptional for a social network. Most enterprise tools sit in the 10–25% range. Monitoring this ratio over time is more informative than any single snapshot.