SaaS Cohort Retention Heatmap

A cohort retention table is one of the most useful things a SaaS business can build — and one of the hardest to actually read once it has more than a few rows. Rows blur together, and the eye can't easily tell a cohort that's retaining well from one that's leaking customers early.

This heatmap fixes that by coloring each cell instead of just printing a number. Rows are acquisition cohorts, columns are months since signup, and color intensity does the work your eye would otherwise have to do scanning a table.

Enter a retention percentage for each cohort at each month since signup. Month 0 is normally 100% (everyone who signed up that month is still active on day one) — leave later months blank or at 0 for cohorts that haven't reached that age yet.

Each cell is colored on a scale from your chosen minimum to maximum retention percentage — darker or more saturated typically means stronger retention, depending on the color scale.

The chart re-renders live as you edit any cell, so you can paste in numbers cohort by cohort and watch the pattern form.

• Read across a row to see one cohort's retention curve over time — a row that stays intensely colored across many columns is a cohort that's retaining well.
• Read down a column to compare cohorts at the same age — for example, comparing every cohort's Month 3 retention side by side.
• A visibly weaker (lighter) row or a sudden color drop partway across a row is where retention degraded — the heatmap doesn't explain why, only where.

• The single lowest cell value in a column shows which cohort is currently weakest at that age.
• A consistent downward color gradient across every row's columns is expected — retention naturally declines with age. What's worth noticing is which rows decline faster than others.
• This chart does not identify a cause for any cohort's performance — it only shows where the numbers you entered are strong or weak.

Each cell's color is mapped linearly between the grid's minimum and maximum values (0% and 100% by default) using a single-hue intensity scale — no smoothing, interpolation, or estimation of missing cells is applied. What you enter is exactly what's rendered.

This tool displays exactly the retention percentages you enter — it does not calculate retention from raw signup/cancellation data, and does not distinguish customer-count retention from revenue retention (use the Revenue Cohort Heatmap for the latter). Cells left at 0 for cohorts that haven't reached that age yet are treated as empty, not as 0% retention. Manual entry only in this version; CSV/file upload and export are not yet available.

Customer Retention Curve Visualizer → Revenue Cohort Heatmap →