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).