Annual vs Monthly Plan Calculator

Twenty-nine a month, or two hundred and ninety a year. That is two months free, and at five per cent monthly churn it makes you thirty-four dollars a customer.

At one per cent churn the identical offer loses money.

An annual plan buys the months a customer would not have stayed for, and nothing else. Somebody who was going to be with you two years pays you the same either way and simply keeps the discount. So the whole answer turns on churn: high churn means there are months to rescue, low churn means there are not, and the line between them is exact.

On these figures it sits at two point seven per cent a month. Above it the annual price is buying you months you would not have had. Below it, the discount is going to the customers who were least likely to leave, which is the opposite of what an annual plan is usually sold as.

The page works out how many of the twelve months a monthly customer actually pays for — at five per cent churn it is nine point two, not twelve — and prices the difference. It also counts the cash, because a year’s money now is worth more than the same money arriving over a year, at whatever rate you say cash is worth to you. Set that to zero and see how much of the answer it was carrying.

It does not claim an annual plan reduces churn. It defers the decision to a renewal date, which is a different thing, and the evidence for what happens at that date is your own renewal rate rather than anything this page can supply.

And there is one thing it cannot measure, which points away from the flattering answer. The customers who choose an annual plan are not a random sample — they are disproportionately the ones who were going to stay. Their real churn is lower than your average, so the months you are rescuing are fewer than the table suggests and the true answer sits below the one shown. The page cannot see that selection, but it tells you which way it pushes.

This is where it differs from a rewards scheme, and the difference is worth stating. What a loyalty scheme causes cannot be measured, because a purchase somebody would have made anyway looks identical to one you caused. Churn can be measured. Measure it, put it in, and the answer here is arithmetic rather than hope.

Save as many versions as you like and put any two side by side, figure against figure, with the better one on each line marked and the difference in its own column. That screen is the one that decides things, and it is the part a free calculator cannot do at all. Churn differs between tiers more than most people expect, so the answer for one plan is not the answer for another.

One HTML file. No account, no subscription, no internet needed. Opens on Windows, Mac and Android; the readme explains the extra step on iPhone and iPad, where Apple blocks JavaScript in downloaded files and every tool of this kind is affected.

Everything lives in your browser on your device. Nothing is uploaded, which is why it works offline and why nobody else can see your figures — and it also means clearing your browsing data deletes it. The tool does not pretend otherwise: the header shows how long since your last export at all times, turns amber after three days and red after seven, and export is one click that produces a plain file you keep.