Churn sounds like a single, obvious number — the rate at which you're losing customers. In practice, there are at least two different churn numbers, and confusing them leads founders to either panic unnecessarily or miss a real problem.

Customer churn vs. revenue churn

Customer churn counts people: what percentage of your customers cancelled this month, regardless of what plan they were on. Revenue churn counts dollars: what percentage of your MRR was lost to cancellations and downgrades. A SaaS business can lose 10% of its customers in a month (often smaller accounts on cheaper plans) while losing only 3% of its revenue, because the customers who stayed were disproportionately on higher-value plans. Reporting the wrong one — or worse, not knowing which one you're looking at — paints a misleading picture in either direction.

Gross churn vs. net churn

Gross revenue churn only counts what you lost. Net revenue churn nets that against expansion revenue — upgrades and add-ons from existing customers. A business can have negative net churn (meaning existing customers are growing revenue faster than cancellations are shrinking it), which is one of the strongest signals a SaaS business can show, and it's invisible if you're only tracking gross churn.

Why multi-provider tracking makes this harder

If your customer base spans two payment providers, a cancellation on one platform followed by a signup on the other — same customer, different payment method — looks like both a churn event and a new-customer event instead of a retained one. Getting churn right requires seeing the whole customer relationship, not just what one platform's webhook reported.

Simeon combines subscription events across every connected provider so churn reflects actual customer behavior rather than platform-switching noise.