Software Growth

DAU/MAU ratio

The DAU/MAU ratio, or stickiness, is the share of your monthly active users who also use the product on a typical day.

The DAU/MAU ratio, often called stickiness, tells you how many of the people who use your product in a month use it on a given day. A ratio of 50% means the average monthly user shows up about 15 days out of 30. It is a quick read on habit. It is also easy to misuse, because "good" depends entirely on how often your product is meant to be used.

How to calculate DAU/MAU

Take the average DAU over the month and divide by that month's MAU. Example: a project management tool has 5,000 MAU and averages 1,000 DAU.

The ratio is 20%, which means the typical monthly user is active about 6 days a month (0.20 x 30). Using the same definition of "active" for both numbers is essential, or the ratio is meaningless.

What good looks like

There is no single standard, and published ranges vary. Eppo's write-up puts below 10% as room to improve, 10 to 20% as average across industries, 20 to 40% as strong, and 50% or more as exceptional, typical of social and communication apps. It notes B2B SaaS commonly falls around 10 to 20%. Other vendors publish higher figures, so treat any single table as a rough guide and compare against products with a similar usage pattern. A tax tool people use once a year should never look like a chat app.

What the ratio hides

Andrew Chen and Li Jin at a16z argue that a single DAU/MAU number reduces engagement to one value, while the power user curve shows how your users are distributed. Two products can both have 20% stickiness: one with a core of heavy daily users plus many dabblers, the other with everyone using it about six days a month. Those are different businesses.

Ways to move it

  • Find the trigger that brings people back (a notification, a report, a teammate's action) and make it reliable.
  • Reduce friction to the core action so a visit takes seconds.
  • Cut "active" users who do not do the core action, so you measure habit, not logins.

When not to use it

If your product solves a weekly or monthly job, track weekly active over monthly active, or the share of accounts completing the core job on schedule. Pushing daily use on a product that should not be daily just adds notifications and churn. For a small SaaS, a stable or rising ratio within your own history matters more than hitting a published benchmark.

Sources

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