How many customers can you afford to lose?
Seven questions, about two minutes. “Will I lose customers?” has no answer. “How many could I lose and still be no worse off?” has an exact one, and it is usually a much bigger number than people expect.
Free, and no card. Two of the questions are optional, and skipping them costs you the number, not the advice.
Informational only — not audit, attest, legal, tax, or investment advice. The churn figure is exact arithmetic on the figures you enter, holding your cost per unit steady; it is not a prediction of how customers will behave.
“Will I lose customers?” is the wrong question, and it has no answer
Every conversation about raising prices runs aground on the same question, and it is a question nobody can answer. Will customers leave? Some might. How many, and which ones, depends on your work, your relationships and the market you are in, and no calculator has access to any of that. So the question gets asked, nobody can answer it, and the price stays where it is for another year.
There is a question next to it that does have an exact answer: how many could you lose and still be no worse off? That one needs two figures you already have — how much of each sale you keep after the cost of delivering it, and the size of the rise you are considering — and it resolves to a single percentage. Keep $55 of every $100 and raise 8%, and you can lose about one customer in eight before the increase stops paying. Keep $30 and the same rise absorbs a fifth of your volume.
The number is almost always larger than people assume, and that gap is where the caution comes from. It is not a licence — losing customers has costs this arithmetic does not see, and the figure holds your cost per unit steady, which stops being true if your costs are still moving. But it replaces a fear with a line, and a line is something you can decide against.
Frequently asked questions
What is break-even churn?
The share of your volume you could lose after a price rise and still be exactly as well off as before it. If you keep $55 of every $100 and raise prices 8%, you can lose about 12.7% of your customers before the increase stops paying for itself. It is exact arithmetic, not a forecast — and it is almost always a bigger number than owners expect.
Does it predict how many customers I'll actually lose?
No, and nothing can. That depends on your work, your market and the conversation you have. What this gives you is the line — the point past which the rise stops being worth having. Most people guess that line far too low and price accordingly.
What if I don't know my margin?
Then no churn figure is produced and the tool says so rather than using a typical one. What survives is the sequencing: who to raise on and in what order. That part needs no numbers at all, and it is where most of the damage in a price rise actually happens.
Why does it ask about my biggest customer?
Because concentration changes the order, not the size. If a quarter or more of your revenue sits with one account, an across-the-board announcement turns a conversation you could have had on your own terms into one you now have to have against a deadline you set yourself. That account gets handled first, separately, before anything is announced generally.