The total predictable revenue your subscription business earns every month — the heartbeat metric that tells you how big, and how fast-growing, the recurring side of the business really is.
MRR is the sum of all the recurring subscription fees you can count on collecting in a given month. If a customer pays you €120 every month, they contribute €120 of MRR; if another prepays for a year, you spread their annual fee across twelve months. The point of MRR is to strip out the noise — one-off setup fees, consulting, refunds — and leave only the steady, repeatable revenue that lets you forecast and plan. It's the number most SaaS founders watch every single morning, because a clean MRR figure tells you instantly whether the business is growing, flat, or shrinking.
Always exclude one-time fees — setup charges, professional services, and non-recurring overages don't belong in MRR because they won't reliably repeat next month.
Say you have 400 active customers, and each pays an average of €120 per month (your ARPA). Multiply the two together.
So you're booking €48,000 of recurring revenue every month. If twenty new customers join next month at the same ARPA, you'd add €2,400 of new MRR and climb to €50,400 — and that delta, not the absolute number, is what really moves the needle.
There's no single "good" MRR value — a €48,000 figure could be excellent for a young startup or worrying for a scaled company. What actually matters is how fast MRR is growing month over month, so benchmark the growth rate instead:
| Monthly MRR growth | Verdict | Typical context |
|---|---|---|
| 15–20%+ | Excellent | Early-stage, strong product-market fit |
| 10–15% | Healthy | Common early-stage target |
| 5–10% | Solid | Scaling past €1M ARR |
| < 5% | Slowing | Watch for plateau or churn drag |
As you scale, sustaining high percentage growth gets harder simply because the base is bigger — so a "good" growth rate naturally moderates over time. Pair the growth number with churn to see whether growth is coming from new wins or just outrunning losses.
ARR · ARPU · MRR growth rate · Churn rate · Customer lifetime value (LTV)
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