Glossary
MAU (Monthly Active Users)
Monthly Active Users (MAU) is the count of unique users who perform at least one qualifying action inside a product during a rolling 30-day period.
General definition
MAU, or Monthly Active Users, is one of the most widely used engagement metrics in software. It provides a smoothed, month-over-month view of the active user base by counting each unique user only once regardless of how many times they interacted during the period. This makes it a better capacity and growth signal than raw session counts.
- The definition of “active” varies by product: opening the app, sending a message, joining a call, and similar events are common triggers
- MAU is the denominator in the DAU/MAU ratio, a standard measure of engagement stickiness
- Many messaging and AI platform vendors price tiers by MAU, billing for every unique active user above a free threshold
MAU is a lagging indicator: it reflects the state of the previous 30 days and changes slowly. It complements the sharper, day-by-day signal from DAU and the infrastructure-sizing signal from peak concurrent users.
In the Ethora ecosystem
On a cloud-hosted managed chat plan, MAU is typically the pricing unit. Each user who sends a message or joins a room in a given month counts against the tier limit. Understanding your MAU forecast is therefore directly tied to your monthly cost, and exceeding a tier triggers overage fees or a plan upgrade. Check the pricing page for Ethora’s tier structure.
With a dedicated or self-hosted chat server, MAU still matters for capacity planning but it does not map to a per-user bill from Ethora. You own the infrastructure, so you decide how much resource to allocate per active user. This is a common reason regulated-industry buyers in healthcare and finance choose dedicated deployments: unlimited active users within a fixed infrastructure cost, with full control over what “active” means in the context of your compliance requirements.
