[cperciva]

Churn doesn't compound, because after churn your user base is smaller and 5% of that becomes a smaller number.

There's a more fundamental flaw: Not all users are equally likely to be lost. If 10% of your users have a 50% chance of finding mates and leaving the dating site each month, while 90% of your users are hopeless losers who will never find love, you'll have a 5% monthly churn rate, but only a 9.9998% annual churn rate.

[shalmanese]

The even more corrosive case in dating is that there's no "happy path". For a SAAS product, you might have incredibly churn for users who join just to kick the tires and leave quickly afterwards but you can sustain yourself on a core of extremely long terms customers who will almost never leave and keep paying reliably month after month.

With dating, there's no equivalent case. Even hookup apps, your users eventually get tired of the hookup lifestyle or they age out or they get enough casual partners to satisfy themselves.

Dating is one of the few services where your customers get unhappier the more money they spend on you.