CalculatorTrader churn cost calculator
Four numbers, thirty seconds: an estimate of what trader churn costs on your own figures.
Churn Cost Calculator
Discentra working estimate: 10 to 15% a month
$200 to $2,000 is our working range
$1,200 to $3,500 a year is our working assumption
Enter your numbers above to see results
What's behind these numbers
Some traders leave over your platform. Others leave after an emotional mistake (tilt, revenge trading, overleveraging). Discentra is built for the moment after a trigger: it places a phone call to the trader within 5 seconds.
How the maths works
The calculator runs a compound churn model on four inputs. It takes your active trader count, your monthly churn rate, your acquisition cost per trader, and an estimated lifetime value, then compounds the monthly rate over twelve months:
Annual traders lost = active traders × (1 − (1 − monthly churn)12). Compounding matters: at 12% monthly churn that is 78% of your book in a year, where a naive ×12 would claim an impossible 144%. Multiply lost traders by acquisition cost for wasted spend, add lost lifetime value for the full figure.
The ranges under each box are ours, not published industry figures: monthly churn of 10% to 15% (working estimate), acquisition cost of $200 to $2,000 per trader (working range) and lifetime value of $1,200 to $3,500 a year (working assumption). Your own cohort numbers will be sharper. The saving lines lower your monthly churn rate by 8%, 15% or 25% of itself: illustrations on your inputs, not a forecast of what any intervention achieves. How much of your churn is behavioural, your own trade data can show. Coaching, not financial advice.
Frequently asked questions
The calculator compounds your monthly churn rate over twelve months to get traders lost per year: active traders multiplied by one minus the twelfth power of the monthly survival rate. Compounding is the honest method. At 12% monthly churn it gives 78% of your book lost in a year, where a naive multiply-by-twelve would claim an impossible 144%. Lost traders are then multiplied by your acquisition cost for the wasted-acquisition figure, and the lifetime value those traders would have produced is added on top.
Our working estimate, not a published industry figure, is 10% to 15% a month. The widely repeated industry number is that ~75% of retail traders quit within 90 days. No regulator publishes it: regulators publish loss rates, which measure something else. The right number to use is your own cohort data when you have it.
On our working range, customer acquisition cost runs $200 to $2,000 per trader across influencer deals, paid ads, affiliate commissions, and free trials, depending on channel and market. On our working assumption, trader lifetime value runs $1,200 to $3,500 a year. A trader who quits inside the first 90 days delivers only part of that yearly value, against the full acquisition cost.
We do not put a number on it in advance. Part of trader churn is behavioural: tilt, revenge trading and overleveraging, which a real-time call is built to interrupt. The 8%, 15% and 25% reductions in the calculator are illustrations of the range on your own figures, not expected results. A pilot is judged on a success test set out in writing before go-live, not on these figures. Coaching, not financial advice.