DAU/MAU stickiness calculator. The 20% line.
Enter daily active users and monthly active users. Get the stickiness ratio plus a category-aware verdict (messaging targets 50%+, B2B SaaS 20%+, ecommerce 5-10%).
DAU and MAU.
Stickiness.
Stickiness is habit math.
DAU/MAU is daily active users divided by monthly active users. The number tells you what fraction of monthly users come back each day. Andrew Chen and Facebook's early growth team named 20% as the line above which a product crosses from occasional-use into habit-use, and 50% as the line above which it becomes a utility. The calculator above shows your ratio against category benchmark, plus the average days-per-month a typical user returns, plus the engaged-MAU-adjusted ratio that strips out one-touch users.
Three principles for product engagement. One, fix activation before retention — most apps that struggle on stickiness lose users in the first session before the value is felt. The Reforge framework names this the activation gap. Two, push notifications and email work in opposite directions — notifications pull active users back, emails reactivate dormant ones. Mix them by user state, never broadcast the same trigger to both groups. Three, streak mechanics work but only when the streak is meaningful (Duolingo lessons, Snapchat snaps); fake streaks (login-only) churn users when they realize the streak is performative.
Tools in the same cluster: SaaS Quick Ratio for the financial-efficiency view. Churn Rate Calculator for the leakage view. SaaS Magic Number for the sales-efficiency view.
Six answers.
What is DAU/MAU stickiness?
DAU/MAU equals daily active users divided by monthly active users, multiplied by 100. The number tells you what percentage of monthly users come back each day on average. A 20% stickiness ratio means 20 of every 100 monthly users return on a given day. The metric was popularized by Facebook's early growth team and is now the standard product-engagement north-star for consumer apps and many B2B SaaS.
What's a healthy DAU/MAU by category?
Messaging apps (WhatsApp, Slack, Discord) target 50-65%. Social media (Instagram, TikTok) target 50%+. Consumer productivity (Notion, Todoist) target 30-40%. B2B SaaS (CRM, dashboards) target 20-30% for daily-use tools, 10-15% for weekly-use tools. Ecommerce (Amazon-style retail) targets 5-15%. Content sites (newsletters, news) target 25-40%. The range is wide because category cadence is wide; a 5% DAU/MAU is healthy for ecommerce and weak for messaging.
Why is the 20% line so often cited?
Andrew Chen and other early consumer-app investors named 20% as the line above which a product has hit habit status — users open it for daily use, not occasional use. Below 20%, the product is still occasional or workflow-triggered. Above 20%, it's becoming a habit. Above 50%, it's becoming a utility (something users open without thinking about it). This is a heuristic, not a law; B2B SaaS frequently scales past $100M ARR with sub-20% DAU/MAU because the use case is weekly or monthly, not daily.
Should I use raw MAU or engaged MAU?
Engaged MAU is the more honest denominator. Raw MAU includes users who logged in once 28 days ago and have not returned. Engaged MAU filters to users with at least 2 sessions in the month, or users who completed at least one core action. The calculator above lets you input either; for product-board reporting, engaged MAU is the convention. Some teams report both side-by-side so investors see the gap (a 35% DAU/raw-MAU + 50% DAU/engaged-MAU pair tells the activation story).
What lifts DAU/MAU?
Push notifications (timed to user-specific moments, not blanket). Email digests (only for non-daily users — to daily users, email is noise). Streak / habit mechanics (Duolingo's streak is the canonical example). Async-collaboration features that pull users back (Slack's @mention, Notion's comment-mention). The biggest single lever for a sub-20% ratio: reduce activation friction so users hit the aha-moment in the first session — most apps that struggle on stickiness lose users in onboarding before the value is felt.
Does this tool save my data?
No. Every value lives in this browser tab only. Nothing is sent to any server. Closing the tab clears the data. The Copy Results button puts a plain-text summary on your clipboard.
Sub-20% stickiness?
Our SaaS development engagements ship the activation flow, push-notification stack, and habit mechanics that lift sticky engagement past the 20% line.
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