---
title: Subscription Break-Even Calculator
url: https://tools.usappteam.com/tools/subscription-breakeven-calculator/
date: 2026-09-09
---

# Subscription Break-Even Calculator

Works out which month a subscription business turns a profit, by simulating churn month by month
instead of assuming subscribers stay forever. It runs entirely in the browser, needs no signup, and
stores nothing.

## How to use it

1. Enter your upfront cost - what it took to build and launch, one time.
2. Enter your monthly running costs - hosting, tools, support, anything recurring.
3. Set your subscription price and the cut a platform or app store takes, if any.
4. Enter new paying subscribers added per month, and your monthly churn rate.
5. Read the break-even month, the deepest cash hole along the way, and your subscriber ceiling.

## How the calculation works

**A naive break-even divides cost by profit per subscriber.** That answer assumes the paying base
grows in a straight line forever, which is never true - subscribers cancel. This calculator simulates
the base filling up instead:

    subscribers(t) = subscribers(t-1) x (1 - churn) + new subscribers per month

That recurrence converges on a ceiling: `new subscribers / churn`. If you add 40 paying subscribers a
month and lose 6 percent of them monthly, the base tops out at 667 subscribers - the point where
cancellations exactly match new sign-ups. No amount of time changes that ceiling; only churn or the
new-subscriber rate does.

**Each month's profit is subscribers times net price per subscriber, minus running costs.** Net price
per subscriber is your monthly price after the platform commission comes off:

    net price = price x (1 - commission)

Cumulative profit starts at negative your upfront cost and adds each month's profit as the base grows.
The break-even month is the first month that cumulative number crosses zero.

**Steady-state monthly profit decides whether break-even is even possible.** It is the ceiling
subscriber count times net price, minus monthly running costs. If that number is zero or negative, no
amount of waiting produces a break-even - the business loses money at every subscriber count it can
ever reach, and the fix has to be price, churn, growth rate, or costs, not time.

**The deepest cash hole is the lowest point cumulative profit reaches before turning positive.** That
number - upfront cost plus every early month still in the red - is the runway a business actually
needs, which is a more useful planning number than the break-even month by itself if someone still has
to fund that gap.

## Why this gives a different answer than cost divided by profit

Dividing upfront cost by monthly profit per subscriber assumes a subscriber count that keeps climbing
in a straight line. Real subscription bases curve and flatten because of churn. On a business with
double-digit monthly churn, that flattening happens fast enough that a naive calculation can promise a
break-even month that never actually arrives - the paying base simply never gets big enough to cover
costs. Simulating the curve month by month, the way this tool does, is the only way to catch that.

## What it does not model

Free trials that never convert, refunds and chargebacks - it treats every subscriber entered as
already paying from month one. Marketing spend beyond landing the subscribers you type in. Taxes and
payment processing costs outside the platform commission. Price increases, seasonal demand, or churn
that improves as a product matures. Treat its break-even month as an upper bound on how fast that can
happen, not a guarantee.

## Questions

**Why does this give a lower or later answer than other break-even calculators?** Because most others
multiply monthly profit per subscriber by however many months it takes to clear the upfront cost,
which assumes subscribers never cancel. This one caps the paying base at a churn-determined ceiling,
which is almost always lower than an unbounded straight-line projection.

**What commission should I pick?** Zero percent for a direct sale through your own site. Fifteen
percent for Apple's or Google's small-business or subscription rate, which covers most launching apps.
Thirty percent for the standard rate above the first million dollars a year in store earnings.

**What if the calculator says I never break even?** It means steady-state monthly profit - subscribers
at the churn ceiling, times net price, minus running costs - is zero or negative. That is a real signal
to raise price, cut churn, add more new subscribers per month, or lower running costs, not a bug in the
math.

**Is anything sent to a server?** No. It is JavaScript in your browser. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is
stored, and closing the tab erases it.

## About US APP Team

US APP Team builds custom iOS and Android apps for a fixed price, from one codebase to both stores. If
the numbers above pencil out, start a brief at https://usappteam.com/app-brief