Glossary
DAU
Meaning and details
DAU counts distinct people who did something meaningful in the product yesterday or today, where meaningful is a definition you set: opened the app, or better, performed the core action. It pairs with MAU to form the eng...
DAU meaning
Daily active users: the count of unique users who engaged with the product on a given day.
What is DAU?
DAU counts distinct people who did something meaningful in the product yesterday or today, where meaningful is a definition you set: opened the app, or better, performed the core action. It pairs with MAU to form the engagement ratio DAU/MAU, the fraction of your monthly users who show up on a typical day.
Why it matters to an indie builder: DAU is the honesty metric. Signups flatter, revenue lags, but daily usage reveals whether the product earned a habit. The ratio contextualizes it: above 20 percent is healthy for a work tool, above 50 percent, territory almost reserved for messaging and social products, means the product is part of a daily workflow. For a weekly-cadence tool, say invoicing or reporting, a low ratio is not failure, it is the category's shape, and the honest daily metric is the one aligned to the job's frequency.
A concrete example: a habit tracker crosses 10,000 registered users, and the team celebrates, but DAU reads 900. The ratio, 9 percent of the month's actives, exposes the celebration as premature for a product whose entire premise is daily use. Instrumenting the core action, logging one habit, shows 900 daily users but only 300 daily loggers. The onboarding fix targets the first logged habit within 60 seconds of signup. Six weeks later DAU is 2,600 and the ratio 24 percent. Nothing about the marketing changed; the product became what it claimed to be.
Common mistakes: defining active as opened the app, which counts notifications-taps and accidental launches as engagement, counting sessions instead of unique users, which inflates the number per user and destroys cohort math, averaging DAU over a month to smooth bad news instead of investigating it, and reading DAU without the denominator context of MAU and signup cohort, where the real story lives. The analytics blocks on IndieBoot, PostHog and the privacy-first alternatives, compute DAU, MAU and the ratio from one SDK.
How is DAU calculated?
It’s calculated by counting unique users who interacted with the product daily.