"What is an average churn rate?" is one of the most-Googled questions in subscription commerce. The honest answer: it depends entirely on what you sell. A vitamin replenishment subscription and a curated mystery box live in different worlds — averaging them together produces a number that helps neither.
Rough benchmarks by category
- Consumables / replenishment (coffee, vitamins, pet food): 5–8% monthly churn is healthy. Anything under 5% is excellent.
- Beauty and personal care boxes: 7–12% monthly churn is normal. Discovery fatigue drives the high end.
- Curation boxes (mystery, novelty, themed): 10–15% monthly churn is common. People sign up for the experience and exit when novelty wears off.
- B2B SaaS: 1–3% monthly churn is the target. Annual contracts skew this lower than ecommerce.
- Consumer SaaS / streaming: 3–6% monthly is typical.
Why the average is misleading
Aggregate "average churn" numbers blend categories with very different unit economics. A 10% monthly churn rate is a crisis for a high-CAC SaaS business and totally normal for a novelty subscription box. The number alone tells you nothing — you need to know the cohort, the price point, the product category, and whether you are measuring voluntary or total churn.
What to do with the benchmark
Compare yourself to your own past trend first, your direct category second, and the broader industry average a distant third. A category-specific 12-month churn-rate study is worth more than the most-cited blog post on the topic. For a deeper view, see churn rate analysis and average churn rate for SaaS.