What public retention disclosures actually tell us

A separate corpus of 20,751 customer- and client-retention items spanning 4,993 unique companies. Retention is structurally different from NPS — not a survey score, but a measure of customers (or revenue) carried from one period to the next. The data tells two distinct stories: a gross-retention story below 100%, and a Net Revenue Retention story that can exceed it. Both matter, and they should not be benchmarked against each other.

Distinguishing gross retention from NRR.

Retention disclosures cluster into two distinct ranges:

The corpus contains roughly 4× more gross-retention disclosures than NRR disclosures, but NRR is rising faster — and NRR is the more analytically valuable number because it captures the expansion dimension that pure retention misses.

20,751 items, 4,993 companies, 2018–2026.

Roughly five times the size of the NPS dataset by raw items, but about one-tenth the size by usable numeric disclosures. Most "customer retention" press writing is generic (programmes launched, vendor partnerships, churn-reduction commentary) rather than rate-bearing. The 489 directional rows partially make up the gap — and for outreach purposes are arguably the higher-yield half.

NRR disclosure is a 2023+ phenomenon. Gross retention has been flat for years.

The 2023 inflection is sharp and meaningful. Two things happened simultaneously: SaaS investors started emphasising NRR in earnings reviews after the 2022 rate environment squeezed valuations, and NRR shifted from being a private board-pack metric to a public-disclosure norm. Snowflake leads — five disclosures over 2023–2025, all between 125% and 158%. Figma, GitLab, Showpad, ketteQ, Wallarm and PayZen followed.

The headline split.

The 90–99% gross-retention zone is the largest cluster, which is exactly what you'd expect — it's the standard "we kept most of our business" disclosure that companies use to anchor narrative. The 27% of the corpus disclosing below 90% is more interesting: these are companies acknowledging real customer turnover, which (unlike NPS) doesn't seem to suffer the same survivorship-bias filter. Public retention numbers below 90% appear in earnings calls more freely than negative NPS scores do.

Tech/SaaS dominates NRR; Retail and Auto disclose more honest gross numbers.

Gross retention (rates 1–100%)

Net Revenue Retention (rates >100%)

NRR is essentially a SaaS-only disclosure norm. Outside Tech, only fintech and a handful of cybersecurity / vertical-software firms publish it. That's not because non-SaaS firms don't have the data — they may have something equivalent — but because investor expectations don't yet require disclosure outside SaaS.

Within gross retention, the Retail (70%) and Automotive (70%) numbers are far below SaaS (95%) — which actually reflects industry reality. Physical retail and auto sales have genuinely tougher repeat-customer dynamics than subscription software. The honest read is that 70% in retail is a defensible result; 95% in SaaS is table stakes.

The companies whose retention story we can actually track over time.

The 489 directional rows are arguably more honest than the rate-bearing ones.

Recent directional claims — "+2pp" (Tradewindow), "+42%" (Burst), "down" (Spectrum, T-Mobile, ERIE Insurance, Charter Communications), "up" (NRC Health, Charter) — are easier to take at face value precisely because they don't commit to a specific number with no methodology context. A telecom that admits retention is "down" without quantifying is being more candid than a SaaS vendor claiming a clean 100% gross.

For prospecting and outreach, both halves of the corpus are useful: rate-bearing rows are benchmarkable; directional rows surface intent and movement. Combined, the corpus covers 4,993 named companies that have publicly engaged with retention as a metric in the last 8 years.

Five things companies should do when they publicly disclose a retention number.

1. Name the metric exactly. Gross logo retention, gross dollar retention, net revenue retention. The single biggest credibility lift available, currently absent from ~95% of disclosures. NRR vs gross are not interchangeable.
2. Specify the cohort. "All customers" or "enterprise tier" or "FY2024 cohort" matters. A retention figure without a denominator is unverifiable.
3. State the time window. Quarterly, annual, trailing-12-month. "Retention rate of 94%" with no window can mean anything.
4. Disclose for at least three consecutive periods. One-shot announcements look like cherry-picks. Snowflake's 5 NRR disclosures and Trade Desk's 12 gross disclosures are the gold standard. Apple's range of 77–95 across 5 disclosures is more credible than any single 95% claim.
5. Include the directional context even when the number is good. "94%, up from 91% last year" is harder to fake and easier to trust than a standalone 94%. "NRR of 125%, up from 119% last year" is the SaaS-investor gold standard.

How this was produced.

15 years of Google Alerts for "Customer retention", "client retention" and related variants. Items classified by claude-haiku-4-5 with the metric_type tag set to RETENTION. Numeric rates extracted into a dedicated retention_rate field; directional language ("doubled", "+2pp", "increased", "down") into a retention_change field. The valid range for retention rates is 0–200% (capturing both gross retention 0–100% and Net Revenue Retention >100%); rates outside that window (typically subscriber counts mis-extracted as percentages) are filtered. Soft dedup at canonical level on (company-or-domain, value, ±5-day window). Retention Intelligence does not independently verify any reported figure.

Generated 2026-05-06 · Dataset: 20,751 RETENTION-tagged items · 3,491 canonical SCORE_ANNOUNCEMENT rows · 373 with valid 1–200% rate (303 gross + 70 NRR) · 489 with directional claim · 4,993 unique companies.