ChartMogul's benchmark is a mirror of its own customer base

The record

ChartMogul, a subscription-billing analytics vendor, publishes a standing set of benchmark pages built from its own platform data. Its SaaS Benchmarks Report states plainly that 'we analyzed anonymized and aggregated data from ChartMogul to calculate all aggregates,' drawn from more than 2,100 SaaS businesses over the 12 months ending March 2023, limited to companies active on the platform for the full period. A companion page, the SaaS Retention Report, uses the same 2,100-plus-company base over 2022 to focus specifically on gross and net revenue retention. As retrieved on 16 September 2026, both pages present ChartMogul's own customer cohort, not a market census, and both are updated periodically rather than dated to a single release.

What the documents establish

The documents are consistent about their own boundary: figures are anonymized aggregates from businesses that use ChartMogul to track their subscription revenue, which by construction excludes companies that use a competing analytics tool or none at all. Within that population, the benchmarks report states that top-quartile companies with $1 million to $30 million in ARR grew 62.1% in the trailing period, while top-quartile companies under $1 million in ARR grew 139.1%, and that companies with net revenue retention above 100% grew 43.6% annually versus 40.1% for those with gross retention above 100%. The retention report adds its own caution in the text itself, telling readers to take the section's benchmarks 'with a grain of salt' because companies have different selling motions the aggregate cannot capture. That caveat is ChartMogul's own, not an outside auditor's, and it applies to every figure on the page, not only the ones a reader finds convenient.

The operating read

The editorial read is that a platform-native benchmark carries a selection effect before any statistics are run: ChartMogul's customers skew toward subscription businesses organized enough to instrument their billing data in the first place, which is not the same population as all private SaaS companies. That does not make the figures useless, but it means a founder should treat a ChartMogul percentile as a comparison against similarly instrumented peers, not against the SaaS market at large, and should not average a ChartMogul figure with a differently defined retention number from another vendor's report.

What to check before you decide

Before using a ChartMogul benchmark in an investor update or board deck, check the following.

• Does your company's ARR band and reporting period match the specific cohort the cited figure describes?
• Is the retention figure gross or net, and does that match how your own board reports the metric?
• Was the page retrieved recently, given that ChartMogul updates these pages rather than dating a single fixed edition?

A platform benchmark is most useful as a sanity check against peers who share your instrumentation, not as an external grade on the business as a whole.