Expansion revenue is the extra recurring revenue you earn from customers you already have, and this calculator works it out along with your expansion rate. In a healthy subscription business, growth does not come only from new customers; existing ones spend more over time as they upgrade to higher tiers, add seats or users, and buy additional products. That additional recurring revenue is expansion, and it is some of the most valuable growth there is, because it comes from customers who already trust you, costs almost nothing to acquire, and is what pushes net revenue retention above 100 percent. The best SaaS businesses generate a large share of their growth from expansion, building a flywheel where the installed base grows revenue on its own. This calculator quantifies it. You enter your upsell MRR, where customers move to higher-value plans, your cross-sell MRR, where they buy additional products, and your starting MRR for the period, and it returns the total expansion MRR, the expansion rate as a percentage of your starting base, and the breakdown. The results update as you type. Use it to track growth from existing customers, to demonstrate the strength of your retention motion, or to set expansion targets for your customer success and account teams. The total expansion MRR is simply upsell plus cross-sell, and the expansion rate is that total divided by your starting MRR. A strong and rising expansion rate is a powerful signal: it means customers find more value in you over time, it lifts lifetime value and net retention, and it reduces the pressure to acquire new customers just to grow. Because expansion revenue carries little acquisition cost and high margin, it is often the most profitable growth a subscription business can pursue, which is why so much effort goes into onboarding, adoption and account expansion.
Expansion MRR = upsell + cross-sell. Expansion rate = expansion / starting MRR. Expansion is high-margin, low-cost growth and the key driver of net retention above 100%.
The total expansion MRR adds the recurring revenue gained from upsells, where customers move to higher-value plans, and cross-sells, where they buy additional products. The expansion rate divides that total by the starting MRR, showing the growth generated from the existing base as a percentage.
With $8,000 of upsell MRR and $4,000 of cross-sell MRR, the total expansion MRR is $12,000. Against a starting MRR of $100,000, the expansion rate is 12 percent, meaning existing customers grew their recurring revenue by 12 percent over the period before any new sales.
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