Average Revenue Per User

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) is the mean revenue generated per individual user over a defined period, calculated by dividing total revenue by the number of users in that window. Unlike LTV, which spans the entire customer lifetime, ARPU is a period snapshot — monthly ARPU is the most common cut — making it useful for tracking monetization trends over time.

Buyers running apps, PWAs, or their own funnels use ARPU to compare monetization across geos, sources, and cohorts on a fixed timeframe, and to spot decay early — falling ARPU in a cohort signals churn or degraded traffic quality before topline revenue shows it. The pitfall is the denominator: mixing active and dormant users, or paying and free users, produces flattering but useless averages. Define the user base precisely and keep it consistent.