Benchmarks

The Benchmarks report shows whether each metric is healthy for a company like yours. Turn the benchmark on and every chart gets green, yellow, and red bands with the peer median drawn as a reference line, so a number reads against its peer group instead of in a vacuum.

The peer group

There is no single "good" SaaS number. A healthy growth rate at €500K ARR is not the same as at €10M, and self-serve churn is not enterprise churn. So each metric is compared against companies like yours on the axis that matters for it, picked automatically from your own data:

• Size (ARR stage) drives the growth and capital-efficiency bands: below €1M, €1-3M, €3-10M, €10-20M, and €20M+ ARR.
• Deal size (ACV segment) drives the retention and churn bands, using average revenue per account: self-serve (below €1K), SMB (€1-10K), mid-market (€10-100K), and enterprise (€100K+).

Your ARR and average ACV come straight from your subscription data, so the peer group updates as you grow.

Reading the bands

The three zones are published quartiles:

• Green is the top quartile, at or above where the best 25% of peers sit.
• Yellow is the interquartile middle, between the 25th and 75th percentile.
• Red is the bottom quartile.

The dashed line is the peer median. For metrics where lower is better (churn, CAC payback, burn multiple) the colors flip, so green always means "good". The line itself is colored by the zone each point lands in, so a metric that is slipping shows it at a glance.

What's benchmarked

Turn the benchmark on from the Benchmark control on the control bar, or open the Benchmarks report, which opens with it on. Bands are available for:

• Growth: annual (year-over-year) and monthly MRR growth, by ARR stage.
• Retention: gross and net revenue retention, by deal size.
• Churn: monthly gross revenue churn, by deal size.
• Profitability and efficiency: gross margin, Rule of 40, CAC payback period, and burn multiple.

What peers look like

These are the approximate peer medians, the dashed reference line on each chart. Treat them as a rough orientation rather than exact targets, and read your own chart for the precise band and median for your segment:

• Growth (year-over-year): around 30% below €1M ARR, easing toward 20% past €3M.
• Net revenue retention: around 92% for SMB, 101% for mid-market.
• Gross churn (monthly): around 3.6% for SMB, 0.7% for mid-market.
• Gross margin: around 77%.
• Rule of 40: around 28, with 40 the line to clear.
• CAC payback: around 8 months for self-serve, 20 for enterprise.
• Burn multiple: around 2 at early stage, under 1.5 at scale.

Compare against another tier

By default you compare against your own peer group. To see how you would measure up a tier ahead, open the Benchmark control and switch the peer group on either axis, for example your retention against the segment you are moving up into. The override applies to the current page and resets when you navigate away.

Profitability needs a categorized P&L

The gross margin, Rule of 40, and CAC payback bands appear only once the underlying P&L is categorized. An untagged cost of goods sold would otherwise read as a suspiciously perfect margin, so instead of painting it green the widget hides the band and tells you what to categorize. Once your transactions are split into cost of goods sold, operating expenses, and sales and marketing, the bands appear.

Where the numbers come from

The thresholds are sourced from published SaaS benchmark studies, not invented: growth and retention from SaaS Capital, churn and self-serve retention from ChartMogul, gross margin and Rule of 40 from Benchmarkit and KeyBanc, burn multiple from Bessemer and a16z. The sub-€3M growth bands are shaded down a few points, because the public datasets skew toward US venture-backed companies that grow faster at small scale than a bootstrapped team does. Each chart names the peer set it used in its subtitle.