Okay, good morning. It's 10:00 A.M. sharp, and welcome to the Oneflow Interim Report third quarter presentation. Today with me here, I have Ilona Prander, our CFO, and my name is Anders Hamnes, and I'm the CEO and the founder of the company. First, some highlights for the quarter. End of Q3, we had SEK 80.5 million in ARR, which is our North Star KPI, 61% growth year-over-year. The net new ARR came in at SEK 5.8 million for the quarter. I will deep dive, of course, into these numbers later in the deck. ARR to net sales ratio of 131%, so we are a pure ARR company. And with a quite fast growth, it's natural that this ratio is also quite high.
Retention, net and gross retention is 117% and 93%. Our LTV, CAC ratio close to SEK 12 . Which means that for every SEK we invest, we get SEK 12 back. First, I would like to, before we dig into the numbers in more details, I would like to just invest some time on three slides to those of you that are new to Oneflow, give you a quick intro on what we are doing. Oneflow is an e-contract platform. You can manage all your steps in the contract process in Oneflow. We talk about pre-sign, sign, and post-sign. In pre-sign, you can create powerful templates. You can collaborate in real time with your counterparties. You can, of course, e-sign the contract when everything is ready.
Post-sign, you can manage your contracts in Oneflow. You can be notified on key events. You can work with the data in the contracts. Throughout this process, we analyze and give our users very powerful insight on what they can do and so on in the process. We have three main sales channels. It's direct sales, where it all started. We do outbound sales and also of course, inbound. We get a lot of leads from marketing that end up at the sales desk, so outbound and inbound mix. Partnerships, we have different programs there, starting to become a very decent share of our business. Very important for us to have strong partnerships, and we have some in several countries.
This is a very interesting channel for us also when we enter new markets going forward. Self-serve is maybe the most some would say maybe exciting because this is very like no or low touch sales. We get leads from marketing, get traffic to the homepage, and some of those sign up for freemium or trial. A percentage of those again will convert to a paid plan or the second version of self-service which is product-driven. A Oneflow user send a contract to a counterparty that get a demonstration of Oneflow, of course, from our user. This counterparty can convert to a freemium and later to a paid plan.
This is a very interesting challenge for us going forward. Yeah, those are the three sales channels. Also one more slide before we go into numbers in more detail. On the market, I would just like to share our reflections on the potential going forward. Because if you think about it, everybody, every company, every department in the whole world have contracts. The potential here in terms of users is so much bigger than, for example, CRM. CRM is only for companies with a sales team, and if you have more than a few hundred customers. That's far from all companies. I would say that the number of user potential is very much higher when it comes to contracts, because every department, every company have contracts. It's like the backbone in business.
You buy, you sell, you hire, you make different kind of agreements and so on. We have just started to scratch the surface. The e-sign companies came first with a very like simple click on a button, sign a PDF document, but there is so much more you can do when it comes to contracts, pre-sign, post-sign, the whole process into a system. This is where we are operating, very exciting times. If we look at third quarter, one of the highlights for the quarter was that we actually, in the end of the quarter, increased our prices quite a lot. We have three paid plans and one freemium plan. The first paid plan is called Essentials. It's a very like simple plan.
We took down the price there quite a lot actually, from SEK 280- SEK 180. We increased the price on Business with 26% and on Enterprise with 42%. The reason we increased or decreased the price on Essentials has to do with PLG. This is how we're all going to grow in the coming years to come. We want the freemium users easily to convert to a paid plan. We want to remove friction. It should be very easy to buy Essentials. It should be not a question and low-touch, no-touch sales. We're going to demonstrate the capabilities in Essentials and with the smart gating, of course, we want the customers to upgrade to Business or Enterprise. Essentials is a very small part of our business.
Our goal is not for anybody to end up there. That's not the end stop. It's just for some of the self-serve customer, it's the first stop, not the end stop. Our sales reps, they never sell Essentials. Rarely happens. They focus on Business and Enterprise. Essentials is only for no-touch, low-touch sales, and it's not the end stop. It's the first stop. We have had our new price. We launched these prices in the end of Q3, and so now they have been live now for about one and a half month. We did a lot of research ahead of that change of course. You never know before you go live, of course. At some point, you just have to push the button.
I had a quite good close follow-up with our sales leaders over the last weeks. The feedback that they give me is that there have been no friction in the sales process with our new prices. It doesn't seem to be an issue at all. We are also working on increasing our prices for existing customers, of course. That's gonna be a longer process, but we have an initiative ongoing for that as well. The ARR is, of course, our most important KPI. SEK 81 million for the quarter, up 61% year-over-year. As you can see, there has been some kind of decline.
The reason we had this peak in Q2, Q3, and so on last year has to do with the pandemic that started one year earlier. In the beginning of the pandemic, things went a little bit slower, and then we had like an extra growth kind of the year after, which is naturally. I would say that we are in a 60%-70% growth range. We're not gonna change our target of reaching SEK 600 million by the end of 2026, which means that we have to be north of 60% growth year-over-year to be able to achieve that.
We don't see this as a trend that's gonna continue to go down. We clearly have an ambition to be in the growth range about 60%, clearly. If we look at the net new ARR for the third quarter, it was up 15% since last year. This was slightly below our own prediction. It's still strong, but it was slightly below. What is hard about this? I mean, we're quite good at estimating internally our sales. Third quarter is special. It is harder to estimate because there is a very short sales window. Most of our business are still in the Nordics or even in Sweden. Here, I mean, July is, as you know, quite slow.
This, the first half of August is so as well. You actually have 5-6 weeks to make the quarter. To be able to have a good quarter, you need a few bigger deals in the mix. Larger deals, they have a longer sales cycle, so that's what makes it tricky to predict exactly where these bigger deals with a longer sales cycle is gonna land within a very short window. That's why it's hard to predict the quarter, and also that's why it came down a little bit. Still okay, good, but still, a little bit below our internal goals. Another reason that also was challenging for the quarter is that we opened two offices in the quarter, one office in Paris and one in Amsterdam in the first week of September.
We have a team now in those cities as well. We opened office in U.K. in May. We have a decent amount of new sales reps in three new countries. Of course, we have used a lot of our resources here in Sweden to train and onboard these people. That's been also a challenge during the quarter, but a fun challenge. And also just before we leave this slide, this does not mean that we grow 15%. This is growth on growth, kind of. The growth is 61% year-over-year because Net New ARR in itself is growth. If the Net New ARR was growing like 0%, we would still have been growing quite a lot. Growth on growth.
Next slide. Net retention at 117%, and gross at 93%. Gross include churn and downgrade but not expansion sales. Net include also expansion sales. Well, I mean, both numbers are quite strong. The reason that net came down a little bit was the same reason as on the previous slide. Expansion sales was a little bit lower in the third quarter. It's hard to predict. It's a very short window. Churn has always been low at Oneflow. Even despite the war and the global recession, churn remained low during the third quarter and in line with previous quarter actually. We've had the same level of churn during the whole year. No pickup during the quarter.
However, we might see a slight impact on churn going forward due to the global recession. Because this happened also in the beginning of the pandemic, we saw that some of the larger accounts decided to downgrade a few seats, because they had a few lower headcount and also typically very small accounts that had a hard time to they were just cutting costs or going out of business. We saw that in the beginning of the pandemic. It might be depending on how deep this recession is gonna take us and how long it will last, but of course, we might see some impacts as well.
On the other hand, new sales will benefit of course from the very strong return on investment in automation by deploying contract management software. With layoffs and with downscaling also comes the needs for being cost-effective and digitalizing the manual resource-heavy processes. In a potentially more I would say challenging economic environment, companies will have to put more focus on productivity. There are two forces here that's dragging in different directions, so to say. Number of paying users close to 27,000 end of the quarter up 65% since one year ago. This is of course only the paying seats, so it doesn't include any counterparties or freemium seats.
If we look at the average revenue per user, it's quite stable around SEK 3,000-3,100 SEK. We haven't changed the price during this timeframe in the graph. It has actually been the same. The reason it goes up and down a little bit has to do with the mix of companies that we signed during the quarter. Because if you are a very big company, you buy a lot of seats, we have a volume discount model, so you will get a lower average price. I would say that the variations on the graph here has to do with if we signed a lot of big deals during quarter, then naturally the average price is gonna go down. Yeah.
We increased our prices quite a lot actually during the end of the quarter, this quarter, or the third quarter. What we show here is the average of all customers all time. It will take some time before you can see the effect here. Of course, you will see the effect here going forward. It's gonna take some time since this is the total average. In Sweden, our net sales came in at SEK 17.8 million for third quarter. Sweden is still a huge market for us and we have a lot more to do in Sweden. I mean, we can grow a lot in Sweden still. It's a lot more business opportunities out there.
We are focused now on expanding. We are very of course happy that we are increasing our share of sales outside Sweden, which came in at 25% for the quarter. Of course, we expect that to increase going forward. A few words about expansion. We have been active now in Norway for a few years. We opened the office in Finland in the beginning of 2021, and the office in the U.K. in May this year, and France and then the Netherlands in September. From an operational point of view, the third quarter has been characterized by, of course, our European expansion. In new markets, we have and unknown brands our teams are new. It will take time to fully establish ourselves, but we are doing in line with our plans.
We are very satisfied with our performance so far, and we have done some really great hires. We are very excited about next year and years to come. When we enter new markets, it's based on a very deep and thorough analysis and of the market maturity, the market size, the competition, and like we have a lot of different dimensions that we monitor. We were quite confident that our U.K., France, and Netherlands met the criteria that we are looking for. It feels, where we stand right now in the middle of the fourth quarter, it feels that the choice we made was a very good choice.
We don't need to have offices everywhere, of course, because we have a sales model. We are in the process of doing this pivot from being a sales and marketing ad company to be more product-led, which means that the product is gonna grow our sales or generate the traffic and sales going forward more and more. We have customers, as you can see, in close to 30 countries. We are present in, I mean, even New Zealand and in Caribbean and Alaska, so on. It's quite a decent spread.
Some strategic capitals, we also want to combine the PLG movement with local presence and sales because big enterprises or larger accounts, there's a huge potential there still to work with sales. Even in the future, in a pure PLG context, you would still need sales reps because most of the product-led sales will be sales assisted. Based on data, use the product just to generate the lead, the traffic, and then you can, based on what KPIs you look for in the product, then you can have sales reps to follow up and so on. Yeah. Next slide, I guess.
Looking at the costs, the gross margin has been stable at around 95%-96%, and enables a high scalability potential. Our cost to maintain the service is very low and consists of hosting-related expenses and also sales commission to partners. Sales commission to partners is the largest part, standing for about 5% of the costs. We expect the gross margin to remain high going forward. Looking at EBITDA for the third quarter was -SEK 11.8 compared to -SEK 3.2 the third quarter last year, which gives an EBITDA margin of -66% compared to -28% same period last year.
The increased costs are completely in line with Oneflow's plan to invest in the future with a focus on product development and in new markets. Increased costs mainly consists of higher employee costs. The group had 145 employees at the end of the third quarter, compared to 91 same period last year. We have also during the third quarter opened two new offices, as Anders said, outside the Nordic. This is furthermore entails higher costs. And EBIT was SEK -17 million compared to SEK -6.7 million the third quarter last year, which gives an EBIT margin of -96% compared to -58% the same period last year. We are investing a lot in the product development, so the depreciation increased compared to last year.
As planned, we will turn around the profitability with our goal to 2026 have an EBIT margin of 20%.
Thank you, Ilona. LTV CAC, one of the other important KPIs that we follow closely, came in at 11.7 for the quarter. For every krona we invest, we get SEK 12 back. The LTV has been stable during this time period in the graph. But the CAC has been going up, and that's why this ratio is declining. The CAC goes up, of course, because of the expansion. We hire a lot of people, and we have a lot of costs with the new offices. This is the reason it's going down, and it's according to plan. When you invest, at least in our business, the return will come a little bit later.
We are very confident about this metric, and at some point, this can turn. I just wanna comment on the calculation here, because it can be done in different ways. If you look at the LTV, how we done it here. That's the most simple way. You just take the worth of the customer this year and divide it on the term, then you get the lifetime value of the customer. Actually, that number is a little bit wrong because what it does not count for is the growth, the expansion sales that you do on the customer.
Because we have a net retention that's been around like 120% or 117% last quarter, but around 120% before that, so we are growing on our existing customers a lot, which is not included in the LTV. We wanted to keep it simple. I mean, that would even increase this LTV, CAC ratio more. Yeah, to keep it simple, we decided to use the simple formula. That's the formula that most SaaS companies use. There is also a different formula that is more advanced, yeah. You know. We always talk about culture in Oneflow.
We believe this is one of our key components for the success that we've had so far and also gonna have for the future. Because to be able to build a successful company, it's about the people you hire, and it's about the culture you build. Talent and happiness are the keys to success. We started to measure this metric in 2019, and above 30 is good and above 50 is excellent. The average in Sweden is 19. Even back in the first quarter of 2019, we were quite good, actually. It has increased, and today we are, like, one of the best places to work.
People here have really enjoyed being here and we focus a lot on talent, superpowers, and culture fit when we hire. To be able to build a successful company, this is the most important component in the formula. We're in a potential, I would say, more challenging economic environment. Going forward, companies will have to put more focus on productivity, and Oneflow is very well-positioned to help our customers become more digital and effective and streamline all processes involving contracts. We're not slowing down. We have a very strong financial position. We have almost a quarter of a billion SEK in the bank. We will invest our money wisely.
Our base scenario is to grow the company organically, and our 2026 goal is based on organic growth. Of course, we will have an opportunistic approach to all opportunities that come our way. Despite our hunger for growth, we will never compromise our strong financial position and always be humble and strive to make sound long-term business decisions. Even though based on the signals that we see in the market right now, we want to reaffirm our goals of achieving at least SEK 600 million in ARR in 2025-2026 and even an EBIT margin the same year of at least 20%. With that, we are ready for the Q&A session. There is a Q&A button in your Zoom menu where you can use.
Yeah, popping in and out. The first question is, "What has been the feedback and traction with recent price increases?" I have had a lot of conversations with our sales leaders about that. There has been. We don't feel any friction so far. It feels that the increases that we did was not, like, a problem at all. So far, no friction around that. The sales leaders are happy, especially the enterprise team were super happy that they finally could get bigger deals. We're also working on increasing our prices for the existing customers.
When it comes to recruitment, how many do you aim to be by the end of the year?" Well, we have never guided on that number, but I mean, a lot of people are coming out in the market now. A lot of companies are laying off people, so there is more talent out there now. What I can say is that we will use our funds wisely. We don't chase short-term wins. We always think long-term, and we gonna be smart about how we invest this money. We can't give any guidance on the headcount going forward, but we're gonna be smart here. Cash flow tied up in working capital also did that in third quarter last year, typically seasonally. Will you, Ilona, comment on that one?
You can see the questions here.
Yes. That's actually typically seasonal because we have less sales during the Q3, so we don't increase our prepaid customer.
What you can say then though is that now when we expand into new markets and the more of our sales that comes outside Sweden and the Nordics, then in the future, Q3 might be less vulnerable because in some other markets, it's not like closed down in July and the first half of August. I mean, in U.K. it's business as usual during July or almost at least. There are different like seasonal holiday patterns in different countries. That might make it easier for us to predict the quarter as well, and even to have a higher sales in the quarter. Yeah. Traction in the new offices. Yes, we do close deals all the time in the new offices.
We haven't given any numbers on that. But what we have said is that we are so far in line with our own predictions, and we're happy so far with where we are right now. Did any large contracts fall into Q4 from Q3? Yes. Several. We thought Q3 should be amazing, and it became good. The answer to that question is yes. We had several very large contracts that slide into the next quarter. This is a very long question. "So I know you mentioned that the global recession could both mean higher churn but also increase demand for cost-effective software.
Could you maybe elaborate on that and if you are seeing any changes to customer behavior in terms of prolonging sales cycles, hesitant buying behavior, or maybe slower upselling? So far, not any significant changes. When I said that we might see an increase in churn, that was also based on when you look out the window and read the papers. What we have seen, I had a long conversation with our head of enterprise team about a few days ago, and if anything then maybe a little bit longer decision time on bigger deals. If anything, maybe a little bit longer sales cycles on large deals.
What this situation is gonna mean for our churn and downgrades is a little bit too early to say actually. We think that I mean, depending on how deep this is gonna go and how long it's gonna last, of course when big companies lay off people, they might also need fewer seats in Oneflow. We know that a lot of small companies have problems to survive on accounting costs. If you sign a few deals like a month, then yeah. That's on the negative side. There are also really, really strong arguments for now eliminating manual work because the highest expense companies have is not the software they buy.
It's salaries. Human beings. That's it. It's so much bigger cost. There are some really strong arguments for becoming effective and to eliminate manual work. If you go for an e-signing tool, which is maybe our main competitor at the moment, or it is, then you only solve a very small piece of the process. There are really strong arguments for changing from e-signing to an e-contract platform because then you can because you save much more time pre- and post-sign. Signing is just like a button. It takes two minutes to print and scan a contract. There is so much more to it than just the signing part.
In a broader perspective, what would be your best guess on how the recession would impact you? Do you think that invest in this type of software will be postponed a bit until your customer have more visibility on the macroeconomics environment and how they need to adjust their organization? What are your thoughts on this?" Yeah, I guess I answered that also in the previous question. Maybe a little bit longer sales cycles. Still maybe because before this is just based on Q3, before the summer it was like nothing, no change at all. This is more based on the last, like few weeks, if that is significant enough data. Too early to say, but maybe a little bit longer sales cycle.
Yeah, there are a few more questions here, but I think I already answered those actually. Okay. I think that we can thank you for attending today and wish you all a wonderful Friday and weekend. Sorry, there is one more. "Relating to the price increase, it might be a simple calculation, but could you explain how we should think about the Net New ARR adjusted for the price change, to get an idea of the sort of volume development to your subscription base of the quarter?" Well, to give you an answer on that, we would have to give you the mix on seats across different price plans.
We have not done so up until now, and we might do that going forward, but I don't think I can comment on that before we make a decision on doing a more deep breakdown on the numbers. I'll think about it maybe for the future, but I can't disclose more information about that actually at the moment. Thank you.
Thank you.
Have a nice weekend to all of you. Okay.
Yeah.
Cheers. Bye-bye.
Bye.