I signed up and started using, but there are important numbers that I’m missing:
LTV: Life Time Value: how much a patron of a tier will pay before he cancels.
Churn Rate: what’s the percentage of patrons per tier that cancels.
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Thank you for your feedback. Yes, those two reports based on the tier are at the very top of my list of things to add next.
Hopefully I should be able to have them available soon. I’ll let you know when they are 
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I’m a huge fan of Profit Well. They have a lot of resources for Software as a Service companies, including the explanation and formulas for LTV and Churn: Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) | How to Calculate & Improve It
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Me too! Yes, their resources are great and they were super useful while I was adding the various metrics.
They (and some of their competitors) were actually what inspired me to provide a similar tool for Patreon creators.
I used those tools in various companies and I always found them super useful to see how the customers were growing/behaving, and I thought that creators should have the ability to access to that kind of data in a similar way in order to better understand (and reach out) to their supporters.
I just want to follow up on this as I’ve just added them 
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This is not exactly what I’m expecting.
This graph says that each patron in my $5 tier (Petite Oppai) will have paid me only $2.16 over their life time? How is that possible, if on the first month they paid me $5? I have upfront payment enabled.
I was expecting a number between 0% and 100% for my churn rate. I think theses numbers don’t make sense, because it punishes me for having a lot of acquisition. If I had very little acquisition, then these numbers would be small.
@CreatorMetrics , Can you make a chart like this one from the main article?
Also, if someone subscribes on the first month and then unsubscribes 1 day later, do they count as a churned patron?
That’s an estimation of the life time value (LTV) that uses the churn rate and the average payment to calculate how much on average someone will pledge for you (and not how much they have pledged, there is another graph for that, even though I’m waiting for Patreon to provide payments status data on upfront payments, which they currently don’t provide 
so for now it’s only taking into consideration payments after the first one in case of upfront payments).
For example, on the Petite Oppai:
- on average your patrons pledge on that tier $5.10 (graph), it’s not exactly the $5 you have set on Patreon, because you have patrons pledging in other currencies (not just usd), and that takes into consideration the daily exchange rate
- the next step is to take how long patrons support you, and in the case of the Petite Oppai it’s currently 0.42 months (graph), which is calculated directly from the churn value (graph), which for that tier it’s currently 236.17% (1 / 236.17 * 100 = 0.42342)
- Multiplying those 2 (5.10*0.42342) would give you the $2.16 LTV estimation for that tier
This brings us to the next point:
The churn is calculated like the “Simple Way” from the ProfitWell’s post, which is also how they (and many other companies) calculate it: taking the churned customers during a given period divided by the number of customers at the beginning of the period.
As it’s mentioned in that same post that method is not the best when there is a high growth like in your case.
In the last 30 days you had an impressive growth of patrons (6x), which is awesome and you totally deserve it (seriously!), but it messes up a little bit the graph until it stabilizes a bit as at the moment the number of patrons that have churned during the last 30 days are more than the ones that you had 30 days ago, and that causes a >100 (or even 200%) churn. But that will go down as soon as such growth will decrease (and if you’ll keep growing 6x every 30 days I’ll want to know your secrets 
).
I’d love to add something like that (or better something more “tabular” like the cohort below). I can’t promise anything on if or when I’ll be able to add it, but it’s definitely something I’d like to provide. I’ll do my best 
On that spreadsheet it doesn’t seem that they’re counted as churned, but I do on the graphs as I consider them as “lost” patrons (same if they subscribe and the payment fails, or gets marked as fraud).
I’m also constantly tweaking the calculations while I discover and go through more data from Patreon from different creators/pages. Every time there is a new discovery (or data weirdness) to take care of 
Your statistics (and the interviewed patrons that left) gave me two actionable insights:
- Change my development cycle from 3 months to 1 month: People are paying every month, so they should get what they want every month.
It’ll take a few months to implement this change, then I’ll measure if the churn rate reduces.
- If the churn rate is still high, then I’ll try to add the $2 tier back, because even though it generates less revenue per month, the churn rate seems lower and the LTV seems to be higher.
LTV and churn are more important than monthly recurring revenue.
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I’m super happy that you were able to get to these insights and that you’re finding it useful! 
I totally agree 
@Oppai-Man (and @brianmcf, FYI as well 
), I’ve just added that kind of information as a table, instead of a graph, as it’d better show the difference between months.
You’ll get something like the following:
That’s exactly what I was looking for!
Can I also get some benchmark to know if my numbers are good, great, or poor?
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I have some ideas about benchmarking by comparing the page with other creators in the same category/creation types/similar sizes (and not against Netflix or similar services with entire teams dedicated to retaining customers); but before I’ll be able to do that I’ll need a bit more data and creators using it.
Hopefully soon enough (even though a dedicated blog post on the Patreon’s blog would speed that up, #wishfulthinking 
)
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