Gross revenue retention (GRR)
Also called: GRR, Gross dollar retention, GDR
The percentage of recurring revenue retained from an existing cohort after churn and downgrades, excluding any expansion — so it can never exceed 100%.
GRR = (Starting ARR − Contraction − Churn) ÷ Starting ARR
GRR is NRR with the expansion term removed. It measures only the leak: how much of the revenue you started with did you lose to cancellations and downgrades?
Because upside is excluded, GRR is capped at 100%. A company at 100% GRR lost nothing. Most healthy B2B SaaS businesses sit somewhere between 85% and 95%, with enterprise-weighted businesses at the higher end and SMB-weighted businesses lower.
Why you need both numbers
NRR and GRR answer different questions and can move in opposite directions.
A company can post 115% NRR while GRR falls from 92% to 84%. That looks fine on the headline metric, but it means a small number of accounts are expanding fast enough to mask a growing hole in the base. When expansion eventually slows — and in a downturn it always does — the churn is suddenly visible with nothing offsetting it.
The practical rule: NRR tells you whether the base is growing, GRR tells you whether the product is sticky. Report both, and treat a widening gap between them as a warning rather than a win.
Common mistakes
- Counting a customer who downgraded to a free plan as retained. They contribute $0 recurring revenue, so that is churn.
- Excluding customers who left at the natural end of a fixed term. A non-renewal is churn.
- Netting a downgrade in one account against an upgrade in another. GRR does not net; that is what NRR is for.
Stop calculating this in a spreadsheet
Bunny computes SaaS metrics, revenue schedules and retention from your live billing data — because quoting, subscriptions, usage and invoicing all sit in one system.