Gross retention counts only what you lost: churn and downgrades, capped at 100 percent. Net retention adds expansion on top, so it can go above 100. Watch both, and watch gross first if you are early. A great NRR can sit on top of a bad gross number when a handful of accounts are expanding fast enough to paper over everyone else leaving, and that is a business with a hole in it that will show up two years later. The plain reading: gross tells you whether the product holds, net tells you whether it grows.
4 hand-picked resources, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it The formula written out term by term, with the three performance bands. The right first read if you have been nodding along in NRR conversations without being sure of the calculation.
From Stripe 9 min read
Open stripe.com →Why we picked it Kellogg's argument that churn has too many definitions to be trustworthy, and that private companies should measure NDR the way public ones do. The slides are the reference deck for this debate.
From Kellblog by Dave Kellogg 10 min read plus slides
Open kellblog.com →Why we picked it Concrete splits (70/30 or 80/20 base to variable) and the key design warning: pay on gross retention as well as NRR, or CSMs will chase expansion while the base leaks.
From CS RevSpeak by Angeline Gavino 13 min read
Open csrevspeak.com →Why we picked it The good, better, best NRR bands (100, 110, 120 plus) that boards actually benchmark against, sitting alongside the efficiency metrics they get judged with.
From Bessemer Venture Partners by Kent Bennett, Talia Goldberg, Mike Droesch and others report
Open bvp.com →How expansion, upsell and churn reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.
The same ground, over in Grow organically & retain, our D2C track.
