Strategy & economics
Gross revenue retention
Also known as: GRR
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers, excluding expansion. Measures pure churn and downgrade without being masked by upsell. Paired with NRR, the gap reveals expansion health.
Gross revenue retention (GRR) is NRR minus the expansion layer. Formula: (start-of-period revenue − churn − downgrades) ÷ start-of-period revenue. GRR is capped at 100% by definition (no expansion credit), so healthy SaaS businesses run GRR at 85-95% while NRR runs above 100% via expansion. The gap between the two numbers is the diagnostic signal: wide gap means expansion is doing real work, narrow gap means the business is running on pure new-customer acquisition. Lifecycle programs affect GRR directly (keeping existing customers from churning) and NRR indirectly (feeding expansion-eligible customers to the upsell teams).