Customers needed
Your target income divided by your price, rounded up to whole customers. That's the count you need billing every month, and the MRR and ARR it adds up to.
How many customers to quit your job?
Set the income you want to replace, your price and your churn. This MRR calculator turns it into the exact number of paying customers you need, the recurring revenue behind it, and an honest timeline that doesn't pretend churn away.
To replace your income you need
– paying customers
– MRR you need
– = per year (ARR)
These numbers plateau before you get there
Enter a target income and a monthly price above £0 to run the numbers.
A planning model, not a forecast. It assumes a flat monthly churn rate and a steady number of new customers, and rounds up to whole customers. Real growth is lumpier, so use it to size the goal and pressure-test the levers, not to promise a date.
How the maths works. No hand-waving.
Three small sums, one honest model of churn. That's the whole thing, and it's why the number you get is one you can actually plan against.
Churn works against you
Each month you keep the customers who stay and add your new ones. So some of every month's signups just replace the ones who left. We model that month by month, not with a rosy straight line.
A timeline, or the truth
If your numbers can reach the goal, you get months to 25%, 50% and the full income. If they can't, because churn caps how big you get, you get the plateau and the levers, not a fake date.
Most "quit your job" maths forgets churn
It's easy to divide your salary by your price and feel great about a small number. But a subscription business leaks: every month a slice of customers cancel, and your new signups have to refill that bucket before they grow you at all. Ignore it and your timeline is fiction. This calculator bakes churn into every month, so the number you plan around survives contact with reality.
- The real customer count behind your target income.
- How many signups a month just replace churn once you're there.
- Whether your acquisition and churn can actually reach the goal, or plateau below it.
- The three levers that move a plateau: more customers, less churn, a higher price.
You've got the number. Now make sure it's the right idea.
A customer count is only worth chasing if the product behind it is worth building. That's the next question, and it's a harder one than the maths.
Validate the idea that gets you there
Before you count customers, pressure-test the idea: real demand signals, a competitor scan, sharp positioning and a paste-ready build brief. It's the difference between a number on a page and a business.
Free ebook 100 AI Workflows The prompts and workflows I use to build and ship with AI, in one download. Course The AI SaaS Machine The full playbook: idea to shipped, funded product, built live with Claude. Community The AI Builders Room Build alongside other founders chasing the same number, in the open.
Questions people ask.
Divide the monthly income you want to replace by your price per customer, then round up. If you want £4,000 a month and charge £29, that's 138 paying customers. This calculator does that for you, then shows the MRR and ARR behind it and how long it takes to get there once churn is accounted for.
MRR is monthly recurring revenue: the predictable subscription income you bill every month. It's your customer count times your monthly price. ARR is simply MRR times twelve. Replacing a salary is really about getting MRR high enough to cover what you take home.
Churn is the share of customers who cancel each month, and it works against every new signup. This calculator models it month by month: each month you keep the customers who stay and add your new ones, so a chunk of new signups just replaces the ones you lost. Higher churn means a slower climb, and above a certain point it caps how big you can ever get.
For small B2B and prosumer SaaS, 3% to 7% monthly churn is common, and 5% is a fair default to plan around. Lower is better: every point of churn you cut lowers the number of new customers you need just to stand still. If you don't know yours yet, model a few rates and watch how much the timeline moves.
Because at a fixed number of new customers a month and a fixed churn rate, growth has a ceiling: new signups eventually only replace the ones churning out. That ceiling is your monthly signups divided by your churn rate. If the customers you need sit above it, no timeline is honest, so the tool shows the plateau and the three levers that move it: win more customers, cut churn, or raise your price.
Yes, completely free and there's no card and no sign-up. Change the inputs and the numbers update live, and every scenario has its own shareable link so you can send your exact result to a co-founder or keep it for later.
Now build the thing that gets you there.
You know the number. The next move is a product worth those customers: validated, positioned and briefed, so you're building the right thing from day one.
Validate your idea →
Free to run. Real demand signals, a competitor scan and a build brief you can paste straight into Claude.