Your SaaS metrics, scored for the board deck

What each metric is telling you

These eight numbers are the ones a board or an investor reaches for first, because together they answer three questions: are you growing, do your customers stay, and does each customer pay back more than it cost to win them. Here is what each one means and why the benchmark sits where it does.

• Rule of 40. Growth rate plus profit margin. At least 40 is the bar. It lets a fast-growing company run at a loss and a slow one stay profitable, but punishes a company that is neither cheap to run nor growing.
• LTV:CAC. Lifetime gross profit per customer over the cost to acquire one. The healthy window is roughly 3:1 to 5:1. Under 1:1 you lose money per customer. Well above 5:1 often means you could spend more on growth and still come out ahead.
• CAC payback. Months to earn the acquisition cost back at gross margin. Under 12 months is strong, because it means sales and marketing fund themselves quickly rather than tying up cash.
• Churn, gross and net retention. Churn is the revenue you lose; gross retention is what you keep before upsell; net retention adds expansion back. Net retention above 110% is the quiet superpower of the best SaaS companies: revenue grows from the existing base alone.

Why a single month is a snapshot, not a verdict

Churn and retention computed from one month are noisy. A couple of cancellations in a small book swing the annualised figure a long way, and the annualisation here compounds a single month twelve times, which assumes the month is typical. Use the tool to size where you stand and to brief a board, then track the same numbers month over month before you act on a trend. The calculator is honest about its own limits: if you set churn to zero, LTV is shown as not computable rather than as an infinite, flattering number.

Read the math before you trust the headline

Every output traces to a line in the Show the math table, with the formula next to the result. If a score looks too kind or too harsh, open it and find the input driving it. That is the point of showing the working: the colour is a prompt to explain the number, not a grade to accept.

Who this is for

Founders preparing a board update or a raise, operators who want a fast read on unit economics before a pricing change, and anyone who has been handed an investor benchmark and wants to check their own numbers against it. If you are weighing the tooling around this, the CRM ROI calculator models the sales side, and the rest of the free Mue tools cover the jobs around it. If you want the reporting built rather than bought, that is what Mue does.