Total revenue divided by the number of active users or customers over a given period, typically monthly or annual.
Why it matters
ARPU is a standard health metric in subscription and platform businesses, showing whether the average customer is becoming more or less valuable over time — useful for spotting the effects of pricing changes, upsells, or a shifting customer mix.
In a sentence
"ARPU climbed after we introduced the premium tier, even though total user count stayed flat."
Related terms
- Often confused with: AOV (ARPU is typically used for subscription/recurring businesses and measured per user over a period; AOV is used for transactional businesses and measured per order).
- Synonyms: Average revenue per account (in B2B contexts), ARPA.