Average revenue per paying user (ARPPU)
ARPPU is the average revenue your product earns from each paying user over a period. Unlike ARPU, it deliberately excludes everyone who never spends, so it answers a sharper question: among the people who actually open their wallet, how much do they pay? It is the cleanest single measure of how strong your monetization is for the audience that matters financially.
How it is calculated
The formula narrows the denominator to payers only:
ARPPU = total revenue in a period / number of paying users in that period
The relationship to ARPU is the most useful thing about it:
ARPU = ARPPU × paying-user rate
That decomposition splits monetization into two independent levers — how many users pay (conversion to payer) and how much each payer spends (ARPPU). A product can grow ARPU by converting more free users, by getting existing payers to spend more, or both. Watching ARPU and ARPPU together tells you which lever is actually moving, instead of guessing from a blended number.
Why it matters
ARPPU shows the depth of your monetization, while conversion rate to payer shows its breadth. If ARPPU is high but payer rate is tiny, you depend heavily on a few big spenders and are fragile to their churn; if payer rate is healthy but ARPPU is low, you have reach but weak offers. Both feed lifetime value: paying-user LTV is essentially ARPPU stretched across a payer’s retained lifetime.
In games and apps
In free-to-play games ARPPU is dominated by whales — a handful of high spenders can lift the average far above the typical payer, so teams also look at median spend and at ARPPU by payer tier. A live-ops event that lifts ARPPU without changing payer count means existing spenders went deeper; one that lifts ARPU but not ARPPU means you converted new payers. Subscription apps usually show a tighter ARPPU clustered around plan prices, where tier mix and upgrades are the main movers.
In Keentics
Keentics derives ARPPU straight from your raw purchase events, identifying payers from real transactions rather than estimates, so the figure reflects your true spender base. You can segment whales out, compare ARPPU across channels, countries and offers, and pair it with payer conversion rate to see both levers at once. See the game analytics feature for payer dashboards and the pricing page for plan details.
Related: Active users · ARPU · Attribution · CAC