Customer Acquisition Cost Calculator

This calculator works out what it costs you, on average, to win one new customer, and how long that customer takes to repay the cost from the gross profit they generate. It is built for subscription businesses, SaaS, agencies and ecommerce brands that spend money on ads, content, sales teams or partners to grow.

CAC on its own says little; it matters relative to what a customer is worth. A $500 CAC is excellent if customers bring in $200 of gross profit a month and alarming if they bring in $10. Pair it with the customer lifetime value calculator for the LTV:CAC ratio, and with the churn rate calculator, since customers who leave before payback never earn their CAC back.

The verdict marks payback of 12 months or less as healthy, a common benchmark for subscription software. Many ecommerce and consumer businesses aim much shorter.

This is the fully loaded, blended CAC used in marketing-metrics and SaaS reporting. Paid CAC uses only paid media spend and only customers from paid channels, so it is higher than blended CAC when organic signups are significant. Payback uses gross profit, not revenue: using revenue makes payback look shorter than the cash reality. Cost per order (CPO) works the same way: put marketing spend in the first field and orders in place of new customers.

• Include: ad spend, agency and freelancer fees, marketing and sales salaries with payroll taxes and benefits, commissions and bonuses, CRM and marketing software, events, sponsorships, free trials and promotional discounts used to acquire customers.
• Exclude: customer success and support costs for existing customers, product development, and general overhead such as office rent (unless you allocate it consistently).
• Match periods. If your sales cycle is long, spend in one month wins customers in later months. Use a quarter or a lag (for example, last quarter's spend against this quarter's customers) to avoid swings.

There is no universal good CAC; it only makes sense against customer value. These are common rules of thumb rather than hard standards.

• Lift conversion rates at each funnel step; a site that converts at 3% instead of 2% needs a third less traffic for the same customers. The conversion rate calculator helps track this.
• Shift budget toward cheaper channels such as referrals, SEO and partnerships, which take longer to build but lower blended CAC.
• Qualify leads earlier so sales time goes to prospects likely to buy.
• Raise gross profit per customer through pricing or upsells: this does not lower CAC but shortens payback.