Pipedrive can’t do churn or cohort analysis natively, and it’s not a settings problem — it’s structural. Pipedrive has no concept of an “active subscription,” so there’s nothing for a customer to churn out of. You can put recurring revenue on a deal, but Pipedrive can’t net this month’s MRR against last month’s or group customers into retention cohorts. To get either, you reconstruct it from deal history or add a reporting layer.

That matters because churn is the one number a subscription business can’t run without. Median B2B SaaS revenue churn sits around 3.5% annually, but sales-and-marketing SaaS runs much hotter — roughly 4.8–8.1% monthly (Vena). If you can’t see which end of that range you’re on, you’re flying blind on the metric that decides whether growth compounds or leaks.

Why Pipedrive has no churn number

Pipedrive is a deal-based CRM. A deal opens, moves through a pipeline, and closes won or lost. That model is great for new sales and useless for retention, because a subscription isn’t a deal that closes once — it’s a state that persists and can end later.

SubscriptionFlow puts it bluntly: Pipedrive “has no concept of active subscription, treating subscriptions as static objects,” and using it as your source of truth for subscription metrics carries “a 100% chance of discrepancies… inaccurate churn reporting, faulty cohort analysis” (SubscriptionFlow). Pipedrive’s own recurring-products feature only surfaces MRR and ARR on an individual deal — there’s no portfolio rollup, and no movement breakdown for new, expansion, contraction, or churn (Pipedrive support).

What you can reconstruct by hand

You can approximate churn from Pipedrive, but every route has a catch:

  • Won-then-lost deals. If you log a cancellation as a separate “lost” deal, you can count cancellations — but only if the process is followed every time, and it won’t tie back to the original MRR cleanly.
  • A custom “status” field per customer. Tag accounts active/churned and report on the field. This works until someone forgets to update it, at which point your churn number quietly drifts.
  • Export to a spreadsheet. Pull deal data and build the cohorts in Excel. This gives you a real answer once — and is stale the moment a deal changes, so you rebuild it every month.

All three work. None of them is a live number, and all of them depend on manual hygiene that breaks the first busy week.

What real cohort retention needs

Cohort analysis groups every customer by the month they started and tracks how much of that group’s revenue survives month over month. It’s the difference between “we lose some customers” and “customers who joined in Q1 retain 92% of revenue at six months, Q2 retains 78% — something changed.”

That requires a customer state Pipedrive doesn’t store: an active subscription with a start date, a current value, and a history of changes. Dear Lucy notes there’s simply “no built-in reporting for MRR, ARR, or renewals” in Pipedrive (Dear Lucy) — so the retention curve has to be built from deal history, not read off a dashboard.

The faster path: a reporting layer on the data you already have

The recurring revenue is already sitting on your Pipedrive deals. What’s missing is the layer that reads it, models each customer as a subscription, and computes the movement — new, expansion, contraction, churn — plus the retention cohorts.

That’s exactly what MRR Reports for Pipedrive does. It reads the MRR already on your Pipedrive deals and turns the deal history into real revenue-retention cohorts and a monthly churn number — the report Pipedrive can’t produce at all — without a spreadsheet you rebuild every month or a BI project you have to staff.