Journey

The journey shows how far into your product every account got. That answer is its stage. Each stage shows how many accounts are in it and how much MRR they bring. Pick a stage to list its accounts with their churn risk (Healthy, Stable, High, Critical), the same risk you see on Customers and in alerts. Accounts still in onboarding or activation have no churn risk yet and show as Not scored yet. Churned accounts, where every subscription has ended, are left out of the journey. If one subscribes again, it comes back in the stage it had.

The stages

Every account starts as Not activated and moves toward Power. Each stage is a level of product usage.

Stage	What it means	Default rule
Not activated	Signed up, hasn’t felt the value yet	Where every account starts
Activated	Got first value	Did your activation event in the first 7 or 14 days or, after the first 14 days, reaches Basic
Basic	Uses the essentials	At least 1 key feature event in the last 28 days
Advanced	Uses it with breadth	Used at least as many distinct key features in 28 days as the median active account (minimum 2)
Power	Depends on the product	Meets the Advanced rule and ranks in the top 25% of active accounts by intensity

All calculations use a rolling 28-day window. Four full weeks, so no day of the week gets to bias the result.

Key features are the events you mark as key features in Retain. An active account is one with at least 1 event in the last 28 days and a subscription that hasn’t been canceled.

Intensity is active days × ln(1 + key events) over 28 days. Active days weigh more than raw volume, so a script firing 1,000 events in one afternoon doesn’t crown itself a power user.

Moving between stages

Accounts go up the moment they meet a rule. They go down only after missing it for 7 days straight, so one quiet weekend doesn’t send anyone backward. Activation is permanent. Once an account has activated, it never drops back to Not activated.

Stalled accounts

An account is also flagged stalled when it has sat in its stage longer than 75% of the accounts that have been in that stage (those who already left and those still there), with a minimum of 14 days. While there are fewer than 5 accounts to compare, the limit is 28 days. Power accounts and churned accounts are never stalled.

How stages are defined

You don’t write the rules. Retain derives them from your own data.

Activation event. Retain looks at accounts that subscribed 60 or more days ago and finds the event that best separates the ones who stayed from the ones who left. It tries counts of 1, 2, 3, 5, and 10 inside the first 7 or 14 days. It needs at least 30 such accounts, and at least 10 on each side of the split.
Fallback. With fewer than 30 accounts or no clear winner, activation is “1 key feature event within 14 days”.
Basic, Advanced, Power. Percentiles and medians across your active accounts, as shown in the table above.
What defines each stage. For Advanced and Power, Retain lists up to 3 events that show up much more in that stage than in the one below it (at least 2x as often, in at least 30% of its accounts).

Each stage carries a confidence level. High means at least 30 accounts and retention at least 10 points above the previous stage. Medium means at least 15 accounts. Anything else, and every fallback, is low. Confidence is informative and never blocks a classification.

Editing the rules

You can replace the rules for Activated, Basic, Advanced, or Power with your own, up to 3 rules per stage, all of which must be met. A manual definition is never overwritten by the daily job. Retain keeps refreshing its stats and the events that define the stage. Only the rules stay yours. To go back, use Reset to automatic on that stage.

Day one: bringing your history

A journey with no history starts empty. There are two ways to fill it, and you can use both.

Import from PostHog

If you use PostHog, Retain can import the last 90 days of events.

Create a personal API key

In PostHog, open your user settings and create a personal API key. Give it the Query Read scope.

Find your Project ID

It’s the number in your PostHog project settings.

Fill the form in Retain

Go to Sources → PostHog, then Import the last 90 days. Pick your region (US, EU, or self-hosted). For self-hosted, enter your public https:// URL. Add the Project ID and the key.

The import stops at 2,000,000 events, and Retain marks it as capped when that happens. For realtime events going forward, see Connect PostHog.

Send history through the API

Without PostHog, send past events with a timestamp. The /track endpoint accepts an ISO 8601 date, so the event lands where it happened instead of today.

cURL

curl -X POST https://api.retain.so/track \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -H "Authorization: Basic $RETAIN_WRITE_KEY" \
  -d '{
    "userId": "user_123",
    "event": "report_exported",
    "timestamp": "2026-08-14T09:30:00Z"
  }'

The track method of @retain-so/sdk doesn’t take a timestamp yet. Use the HTTP endpoint above for backfills.

After a PostHog import, Retain replays the last 90 days, so the journey shows where accounts have been and not only where they are now. History you send through /track shows up on the next daily run. Without any history, the journey still works. It fills in as events arrive.

When it updates

Journey states are recomputed once a day, at 09:30 UTC. Stages and the rules Retain derives all refresh in that run.

Introduction

Quickstart

Integrations

Journey

The stages

Moving between stages

Stalled accounts

How stages are defined

Editing the rules

Day one: bringing your history

Import from PostHog

Send history through the API

When it updates

​The stages

​Moving between stages

​Stalled accounts

​How stages are defined

​Editing the rules

​Day one: bringing your history

​Import from PostHog

​Send history through the API

​When it updates

The stages

Moving between stages

Stalled accounts

How stages are defined

Editing the rules

Day one: bringing your history

Import from PostHog

Send history through the API

When it updates