Where your listis actually headed.
Adding subscribers feels like growth, until you account for the ones quietly leaking out the back. Email lists decay 20 to 30% a year through unsubscribes, bounces, and inactivity. Enter your starting size, monthly adds, and churn, and see your real trajectory month by month, plus the ceiling your current rate is converging toward.
Your list
Active subscribers today.
Net new sign ups you add each month.
% of the list lost per month to unsubscribes, bounces, and inactivity. ~2% is typical.
How far ahead to model.
The trajectory
List in 12 mo
8,229
Net growth
3,229
Steady-state ceiling
20,000
Where it levels off.
Total churned
1,571
Added vs churned over 12 months
Projected growth
Sensitivity · churn is the hidden ceiling
Where your list lands by churn rate
| Monthly churn | List in 12 mo | Steady-state ceiling |
|---|---|---|
| 0.5% | 9,378 | 80,000 |
| 1% | 8,977 | 40,000 |
| 2% | 8,229 | 20,000 |
| 3% | 7,551 | 13,333 |
| 5% | 6,379 | 8,000 |
| 8% | 5,000 | 5,000 |
At a fixed add rate, churn sets a hard ceiling your list converges toward — adds ÷ churn. Halving churn can do more for list size than doubling your sign-up rate.
Your move
A growing list is only worth it if it converts. I make sure it does.
List goes from 5,000 to 8,229 in 12 months at 2% churn (ceiling ~20,000).
Plenty of people will help you collect emails. I build the list and the engine that turns it into revenue, the capture, the flows, the offers, the cadence. Tell me where your list is stuck and I'll show you, free, what I'd fix first.
Plain English
Your list is a leaky bucket. Plan for the leak.
Email list growth isn't just how many people you add. It's how many you add minus how many you lose. Every list decays. People unsubscribe, emails hard bounce, addresses go dead, and subscribers quietly stop opening. Industry figures put natural list decay at roughly 22 to 30% per year, or about 2% a month. Ignore it and your projections are fantasy.
That churn changes the shape of growth. Because you lose a percentage of the whole list each month, the bigger your list gets, the more you lose in absolute terms, until losses equal additions and growth flattens. That ceiling is your steady state: monthly additions divided by your churn rate. At 400 new subscribers a month and 2% churn, your list converges toward 20,000 no matter how long you wait.
This calculator projects your real subscriber count month by month, shows total adds versus total churn, and reveals that steady state ceiling. The lesson is usually one of two things: either you need more top of funnel growth to raise the ceiling, or, more often, you need to cut churn, because reducing churn lifts the ceiling far more than adding a few more sign ups.
The formula
Next month = this month + new subscribers − (list × churn rate)
Start at 5,000, add 400/month, churn 2%. Month one: 5,000 + 400 − 100 = 5,300. Month two: 5,300 + 400 − 106 = 5,594. Growth slows as churn grows with the list, converging on 400 ÷ 2% = 20,000. Halve churn to 1% and the ceiling doubles to 40,000, for the same sign ups.
List churn benchmarks
Typical email list decay. The single most leveraged number here is churn, small reductions compound into a much larger list over time:
| Churn level | Per month | Per year (approx) |
|---|---|---|
| Healthy | ≤ 1% | ~11% |
| Typical | ~2% | 22 to 25% |
| Elevated | 3 to 4% | 30 to 40% |
| Problem | 5%+ | 45%+ |
Source: Campaign Monitor / Klaviyo list-health benchmarks · 2025
Your list isn't growing like you hoped. Why?
Churn above ~3% a month.
Your bucket is leaking fast. Audit why people leave, over mailing, weak content, bad targeting at sign up, before pouring in more subscribers.
Adds barely beat churn.
You're on a treadmill. Either lift acquisition or cut churn; running in place burns effort for a flat list.
Steady state below your goal.
Your current adds to churn ratio caps you below where you want to be. Raising adds or lowering churn both lift the ceiling, churn usually moves it more.
Big list, low engagement.
Raw size hides dead weight. A list inflated with inactive subscribers churns harder and hurts deliverability. Prune and win them back.
Spiky sign ups, no retention.
A viral lead magnet that attracts the wrong people churns immediately. Optimize for subscriber fit, not just sign up volume.
How to actually grow a list
01Cut churn before chasing adds
Lowering churn raises your steady state ceiling more than equivalent new sign ups. A welcome sequence and right sized frequency are the fastest wins.
02Nail the welcome sequence
The first two weeks decide retention. A strong onboarding flow turns curious sign ups into engaged subscribers who stay.
03Attract the right people
Lead magnets that match your actual offer bring subscribers who stick. Generic freebies inflate the list with people who'll never buy or open.
04Right size your frequency
Both too much and too little cause churn. Use a send frequency that matches engagement, and let subscribers choose cadence where you can.
05Re engage before you lose them
Win back campaigns to slipping subscribers recover people more cheaply than acquiring new ones, and clean the list of the truly gone.
06Diversify acquisition
Don't rely on one channel. Content, partnerships, paid, and referrals together raise adds and stabilize the top of the funnel.
The vocabulary
- List churn
- The rate at which subscribers leave, via unsubscribes, bounces, and inactivity. Often ~2% per month.
- List decay
- The natural shrinkage of an email list over time, commonly 22 to 30% per year if unaddressed.
- Steady state
- The size a list converges toward when monthly additions equal monthly churn: adds ÷ churn rate.
- Net growth
- New subscribers minus churned subscribers over a period. The only growth that actually counts.
- Re engagement
- Campaigns aimed at reviving inactive subscribers before they're lost or pruned.
List growth questions, straight answers
Most lists lose roughly 2% of subscribers per month, which compounds to about 22 to 30% per year through unsubscribes, hard bounces, and address abandonment. If your churn is meaningfully higher, it usually points to over mailing, poor targeting at sign up, or weak content, fixable problems worth addressing before you chase more growth.
Keep going
A calculator tells you what. A call tells you what to do about it.
Send me the account behind these numbers. I'll tell you straight where the money's leaking and what I'd fix first — free, and you keep it whether you hire me or not.