SaaS Subscription Revenue Projector (free 2026 tool)

What this tool does

Projects SaaS subscription revenue (MRR/ARR) based on customer acquisition rate, conversion rate, and churn assumptions. Helps non-resident SaaS founders plan formation timing.

Who needs it

Pre-revenue and growth-stage SaaS founders.

How it works

1. Enter trial signups per month, free-to-paid conversion rate, monthly churn rate, pricing tiers.
2. Tool projects 12-24 month MRR trajectory.
3. Identifies when LLC formation cost is justified.

Inputs

• Monthly trial signups
• Conversion rate
• Churn rate
• Pricing tiers

Output

12-24 month MRR projection and formation-timing recommendation.

What does the subscription revenue projector actually compute?

This tool takes four numbers you already half-know about your SaaS and turns them into a 12 to 24 month revenue trajectory. You feed it monthly trial signups, your free-to-paid conversion rate, your monthly churn rate, and your pricing tiers. From those inputs it projects monthly recurring revenue (MRR) forward month by month, then annualizes that figure into ARR. The point is not to predict the future with precision. The point is to see the shape of your growth curve so you can answer one specific decision: when does it make sense to spend money forming a Delaware LLC instead of running as an unincorporated side project. A founder staring at zero revenue and a $297 one-time formation outlay wants to know whether that spend lands before or after real income shows up.

The math underneath is a compounding model rather than a flat multiplication. Each month, the projector adds newly converted paying customers, subtracts the slice of existing customers who churn, and multiplies the surviving base by your blended price. Because churn compounds against a growing base, the curve bends in ways a back-of-napkin estimate misses. A business adding 20 paying customers a month at a 5% churn rate does not grow forever in a straight line. It approaches a ceiling where new additions roughly equal churned customers. Seeing that ceiling early is the single most useful output here, because it tells you whether your current inputs can ever reach the revenue level that justifies formation and ongoing compliance cost.

How should you read the four inputs?

Monthly trial signups is the count of new people who start a free trial or free tier each month. Use a recent real number if you have one, even a small one. If you launched last month and got 14 signups, enter 14 rather than an aspirational 200. Conversion rate is the share of those trial users who become paying customers, expressed as a percentage. Early-stage self-serve SaaS often sits between 2% and 10%, though this varies enormously by product and audience. Churn rate is the percentage of paying customers who cancel each month. A 3% monthly churn is healthy for many small SaaS products, while 8% or higher signals that growth will stall fast. Pricing tiers is where you enter what customers actually pay, so the tool can compute a blended average revenue per paying user.

The most common error is mixing time units. Conversion and churn here are both monthly figures. If you only know an annual churn number, do not paste it into the monthly field, because annual churn of 30% is roughly 3% monthly, and entering 30 where 3 belongs will collapse your projection. Likewise, if your trial-to-paid conversion typically takes 60 days, your monthly signup cohort will not convert in the same month it arrives, so treat the conversion rate as the eventual share rather than an instant one. When in doubt, enter conservative numbers. A projection built on optimistic inputs that suggests you can afford formation today is worse than useless if the real curve arrives six months later than the chart promised.

What do the MRR and ARR outputs mean for a non-resident founder?

The headline output is a month-by-month MRR line stretching 12 to 24 months ahead, plus the implied ARR at the end of the window. MRR is the predictable monthly revenue from active subscriptions. ARR is simply MRR multiplied by 12, a convention investors and founders use to talk about run rate. For a non-resident founder, these two numbers matter beyond vanity. They are the figures you will quote when a US bank underwrites your account, when a payment processor reviews your risk profile, and when you decide whether the annual cost of keeping a Delaware LLC alive is comfortably covered by what the business earns.

Read the curve in three zones. The early flat zone is where revenue is small and lumpy, and where forming an entity is mostly a bet on the future rather than a response to present income. The inflection zone is where MRR starts compounding visibly, and where the tooling and credibility of a registered company begin to pay for themselves. The plateau zone, if your inputs produce one, is where churn catches up with acquisition and growth flattens. Knowing which zone you are entering tells you what the formation decision is really about. Forming in the flat zone is a structural choice about liability and banking access. Forming as you cross into the inflection zone is usually the cleaner financial moment, because revenue is arriving fast enough to absorb both the one-time and recurring costs without strain.

Where does the $297 formation figure fit into the projection?

The projector identifies when your modeled revenue justifies the cost of forming and running a Delaware LLC, so it helps to know what those costs are. Our one-time formation package is $297. Inside that, the state charges $110 for the Certificate of Formation, which is the document that legally brings the LLC into existence. That is a single upfront cost. The recurring cost that the projection should clear every year is the Delaware franchise tax of $300, which is a flat annual amount for an LLC and is due on June 1 each year. These are the two anchor numbers a founder weighs against the MRR line.

Translate that into a simple threshold. If your projector output shows MRR crossing roughly $25 to $30 within a few months, the annual $300 franchise tax is already covered by a fraction of one month's revenue, which is a strong signal that formation cost is no longer the constraint. The $297 one-time spend is a different calculation, because it is a sunk setup cost rather than a recurring drag. The useful question the tool helps you answer is not "can I afford $297 today" but "does my curve reach a level where $297 plus $300 a year is a rounding error against revenue." When the projection says yes within your planning window, the timing argument for waiting weakens considerably.

A worked example: a pre-revenue founder testing the waters

Imagine Lina, a developer outside the US, who launched a small scheduling tool last month. She got 30 trial signups, converts about 5% of trials to paid, sees 4% monthly churn, and charges a single $19 tier. In month one she converts roughly 1 to 2 paying customers, so MRR is under $40. That alone already covers the $300 annual franchise tax across the year, but the absolute revenue is thin. The projector matters here because it shows whether 30 signups a month is enough volume to build a base or whether churn will eat each cohort before it accumulates. With these inputs the curve climbs slowly but steadily, because 4% churn is gentle enough that customers stack up over the year.

Now change one input. If Lina's churn were 9% instead of 4%, the same 30 signups produce a curve that flattens within a year at a much lower ceiling, because she loses nearly a tenth of her base every month. This is the kind of insight the tool surfaces that intuition misses. The formation decision flips depending on which churn reality she faces. At 4% churn, forming early makes sense because the base compounds toward real revenue. At 9% churn, the smarter move is to fix retention first, because no amount of formation cost optimization helps a business whose customers leak out the bottom faster than they arrive.

A second example: choosing formation timing on a steeper curve

Consider Marcus, who already validated his product and pulls in 120 trial signups a month at 8% conversion, 3% churn, and a blended $40 price across two tiers. His month-one paying additions are close to 10 customers, and at 3% churn almost all of them survive into the next month. Run that forward and his MRR compounds quickly, likely passing several hundred dollars within the first few months and continuing up. For Marcus the projector is not asking whether he can afford a Delaware LLC. It is telling him that revenue is arriving fast enough that the absence of a formal entity is the bottleneck, because he cannot open a US business bank account or accept payments cleanly without one.

The list below shows how the same outputs lead to different actions depending on where a founder sits:

• Flat curve, low signups, high churn: pause on formation, redirect effort to retention and acquisition.
• Slow but steady curve, low churn: form when you want banking and liability protection, since revenue covers recurring cost.
• Steep curve crossing the inflection zone: form promptly, because the entity is now the constraint on growth.
• Already at a plateau with strong MRR: formation is overdue, and the focus shifts to compliance and tax filing.

Why churn matters more than signups in this model

Founders instinctively chase signups, but the projector usually shows that churn is the dominant lever once you are past the very earliest months. The reason is compounding. Signups add to your base linearly, but churn removes a percentage of an ever-larger base, so its absolute impact grows as you grow. A business with strong acquisition and weak retention builds a bucket with a widening hole. The tool makes this visible by letting you change churn alone and watch the ceiling move dramatically while the early months barely shift. That contrast is the lesson many first-time SaaS founders need before they spend on formation or paid acquisition.

There is a practical formation angle here too. If your churn is high enough that the projector caps your MRR below a level that comfortably covers the $300 annual franchise tax plus your other operating costs, forming an entity simply adds a fixed cost to a business that has not yet proven it can carry it. That is not an argument against Delaware. It is an argument for sequencing. Use the projector to confirm that your retention produces a base that survives, then form once the curve shows durable revenue. Forming a clean, compliant LLC and then letting it lapse because the underlying business stalled creates avoidable penalties and cleanup work that a few weeks of honest projection would have prevented.

What annual obligations should the projected revenue cover?

A Delaware LLC owned by a non-resident carries a small set of recurring obligations, and your projected MRR should comfortably clear all of them. The flat franchise tax is $300 per year, due June 1. Miss that deadline and Delaware adds a $200 late penalty plus interest of 1.5% per month on the unpaid balance, so a forgotten filing compounds into a meaningful number. Beyond the state, a single-member foreign-owned LLC must file Form 5472 attached to a pro forma Form 1120 with the IRS each year, and the penalty for failing to file that pair starts at $25,000. These are not revenue-scaled fees. They apply whether you earned $50 or $50,000.

That fixed nature is exactly why the projector is a planning tool and not just a revenue toy. The numbers below are the recurring and one-time figures your curve should be measured against:

• $110 one-time Certificate of Formation fee to create the LLC.
• $297 one-time formation package.
• $300 annual Delaware franchise tax, due June 1, with a $200 penalty plus 1.5%/month if late.
• Form 5472 plus a pro forma Form 1120 filed annually, with a $25,000 penalty for non-filing.

When your projection shows MRR steady well above the monthly equivalent of these obligations, the compliance burden is a manageable cost of doing business. When it does not, the projection is warning you that the timing or the underlying metrics need work first.

What does the EIN and banking timeline have to do with your projection?

The projector tells you when revenue justifies formation, but acting on that signal involves a lead time you should plan around. After the LLC is formed, you apply for an Employer Identification Number using Form SS-4. For a non-resident without a Social Security number, that EIN typically takes around 8 to 10 business days to issue. You need the EIN before you can open a US business bank account or set up most payment processing, and you need that banking layer before the revenue in your projection can actually flow into a clean business account.

Read the chart with that delay built in. If your projection shows you crossing into the inflection zone in, say, three months, you do not want to start the formation and EIN process at the moment revenue arrives. You want the entity, the EIN, and a bank account ready slightly ahead of that point, so the first surge of paying customers lands somewhere proper rather than in a personal account. Common non-resident banking options once the EIN is in hand include Mercury, Wise, Relay, Lili, and Payoneer. The practical takeaway is to treat the projector's inflection point as a deadline for having infrastructure ready, not as the day to begin paperwork.

Common mistakes when using this projector

The first mistake is entering blended figures that hide a problem. If you have two pricing tiers and one churns at 2% while the other churns at 12%, a single blended churn number can mask a failing segment. Where you can, model your strongest tier and your weakest tier separately to see whether the average is doing you a favor. The second mistake is treating the projection as a forecast you are committing to rather than a sensitivity test. The right use is to run it three times, with pessimistic, realistic, and optimistic inputs, and base your formation timing on the realistic-to-pessimistic range rather than the optimistic one.

A third mistake is ignoring that early signups are not representative. Launch-week traffic from a single post often converts and churns very differently from steady-state organic signups. If your only data point is a spike, the projector will extrapolate that spike across two years, which overstates the curve. The fourth mistake is forgetting that the projection is pre-tax and pre-cost. The MRR line is gross subscription revenue, not profit. Before you conclude that a given MRR level comfortably covers the $300 franchise tax and your other obligations, subtract the real costs of running the product, including payment processing fees and any infrastructure you pay for.

Edge cases the tool can surface

One revealing edge case is the high-price, low-volume business. A founder selling a $200 per month tier to a handful of customers can reach a revenue level that justifies formation with very few signups, because average revenue per user does heavy lifting. The projector handles this correctly because it works from blended price rather than raw customer count, but founders sometimes assume they need hundreds of users when ten committed ones at a high tier already clear every Delaware obligation. The mirror image is the free-heavy product where conversion is so low that even strong signup numbers produce thin MRR, which the curve exposes plainly.

Another edge case is negative net growth, where churn exceeds new paid additions and the projected MRR actually declines over time. If you see the line trending down, that is not a bug in the model. It is the clearest possible signal that formation should wait, because you would be attaching fixed annual costs to a shrinking business. A final edge case worth noting is the seasonal product. The projector assumes steady monthly inputs, so a business that does most of its revenue in a few months of the year will look smoother than reality. For those founders, the right approach is to run the tool on a conservative off-season signup number and treat any peak revenue as upside rather than the baseline that justifies forming.

One thing to remember about BOI reporting

Non-resident founders often budget time and worry for Beneficial Ownership Information (BOI) reporting, and that concern can muddy the cost picture this projector is meant to clarify. As of the FinCEN interim final rule issued on March 26, 2025, US-formed LLCs are exempt from BOI reporting. That removes a step many founders expected and one less recurring worry to weigh against your revenue curve. It does not change the Delaware franchise tax, the IRS Form 5472 obligation, or the EIN timeline, so do not read the BOI exemption as a reduction in your core compliance load.

Keep the projector focused on the obligations that actually scale against your decision: the $300 annual franchise tax due June 1, the one-time $110 Certificate of Formation, the $297 package, and the annual federal filing. Those are the numbers your projected MRR has to clear with room to spare. The BOI exemption simply means the formation decision the tool helps you time is a bit lighter than it would have been before March 26, 2025, which is one more reason that, once your curve shows durable revenue, there is little benefit to delaying.