Also called: GRR
Gross revenue retention (GRR) measures how much of an existing customer base's starting revenue survives a period after churn and contraction, with any expansion revenue excluded, capped at 100% by definition.
GRR starts with the same beginning-of-period ARR figure as NRR, but it only ever subtracts. Churn and contraction, revenue lost to cancellations and downgrades, come out of the starting number. Expansion revenue never gets added back in, no matter how much upsell activity happened in the period. That makes the ceiling 100% by definition: a business can't do better than keeping every dollar it started with, since expansion isn't part of the calculation at all.
GRR isolates the churn-and-contraction problem from the expansion story sitting on top of it. A company can post a strong NRR while its GRR is weak, which usually means expansion revenue from a handful of large accounts is masking meaningful churn happening across the rest of the base. Reading GRR next to NRR is how that gap gets caught, since NRR alone can't tell the difference between retaining well and growing, versus losing a lot of accounts while a few big upsells cover for it.
Because GRR excludes expansion, it's read as the cleaner signal for whether a product is actually keeping the customers it already has, independent of how well upsell motions are performing on top of that base. A business with a low GRR has a retention problem no amount of expansion revenue actually fixes; it just makes the problem harder to see.
A low GRR next to a healthy NRR is worth investigating on its own. It usually means retention itself is the real problem, and expansion revenue from a shrinking set of accounts is doing the work of hiding it.
GRR gets skipped in favor of the more flattering NRR number. But because GRR excludes expansion, it's the number that actually answers whether a product is keeping the customers it already has, which NRR alone can't answer on its own.
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