[jasonkester]

Here are my numbers for S3stat. We don't have free accounts, though we do have a 30 day trial.

  Visit to trial conversion:   3%
  Trial to paid conversion:    26%
  Average subscription length: 11.5 months
  Average cancels per month:   2%

Over time, those last two numbers keep getting better, since there's more time passed for our first loyal customers to inflate the average subscription length, and there's more people on board to lessen the impact of a few people cancelling.

It's worth noting that you only need to calculate one of those last two numbers to know the expected lifetime value of a visit to your site. Until you asked the question, I had never actually calculated my churn rate as a percentage of active users.

[paraschopra]

Interesting stats. How long have you been running S3stat?

[jasonkester]

The beta went live at the end of 2007, and I started charging for it in February 2008.

S3stat goes squarely against one of the biggest pieces of advice I give to fellow startup kids: Never base an entire product off a missing feature in somebody else's thing.

Thus far Amazon have been good in keeping their AWS reports in the same state of disarray I found them in 3 years ago. I don't expect it will stay that way forever.

[paraschopra]

I'm sure by then you will find other successful niches :)

[tnorthcutt]

Do you have any sort of automated solution in place to calculate those stats for you on a running basis, or do you just manually re-calculate at set intervals?

[jasonkester]

I do a little obsession-fest at the start of each month where I pull down income reports for the services I run, update some spreadsheets, and roll around naked in piles of virtual money.

If I could have the bank deliver it all in the form of one dollar bills spilling from canvas bags with dollar signs stenciled on the side, that would help the process immensely.