> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://help.the-meridian.ai/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Retention

The retention screen answers "do customers stick". Churn tells you what you lost this month; retention tells you whether the stores you win stay long enough to be worth winning.

## The three numbers

| Metric | What it says |
| - | - |
| **Net revenue retention** | What the same cohort of customers is worth now versus before. Above 100% means expansion outweighed churn |
| **Average subscription length** | How long a subscription lasts, on average |
| **Active subscriptions** | The base those two describe |

Each is shown against the previous period, and NRR has its own trend chart so you can see the direction rather than one figure.

## Cohort retention

The grid is the heart of the screen: each row is the cohort of stores that **first subscribed** in one month, and each column is the number of months since. A cell is the share of that cohort still subscribed at that point.

* Oldest cohorts on top, so the diagonal is the passage of time.
* **Dashed cells are months a cohort hasn't reached yet**: not zeros. A cohort from last month has no month-six number, and Meridian doesn't invent one.
* The last twelve cohorts are shown, with each cohort's size next to its label so a small cohort's dramatic percentage can be read for what it is.

## How to read it

Read **down** a column to compare cohorts at the same age. That's whether your retention is improving. Read **across** a row to see one cohort's decay curve, which is where a plan change or an onboarding fix shows up.

A cliff in month one is an onboarding problem. A slow, steady decline is a value problem. A cliff at month twelve is annual plans not renewing.

## Related

Cohorts are also available as a visualization in the [Report Builder](/report-builder), where you choose the entity and the fields rather than taking the built-in subscription cohort, up to 24 periods.


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