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Calculate CAC from marketing spend and customers acquired — see CAC, CAC payback and LTV to CAC.
Calculate CAC from marketing spend and customers acquired — see CAC, CAC payback and LTV to CAC.
Enter values above and click Calculate — results will appear here with the formula explained.
Customer acquisition cost divides fully loaded sales-plus-marketing spend by new customers won: $10,000 for 100 customers is $100 CAC. The number alone means nothing — $100 CAC is superb for $1,000-LTV enterprise deals and fatal for $50-LTV consumers. Always pair CAC with lifetime value before judging.
Fully loaded means everything: ad spend, sales salaries and commissions, marketing tools, agency fees, content production, event costs and allocated overhead. Founders routinely undercount by 30–50% by including only media spend — the 'blended CAC' including all go-to-market cost is the honest figure investors use.
LTV:CAC ratio is the verdict metric: 3:1 or better signals healthy unit economics (each acquisition dollar returns three), 1:1 is treadmill, below 1 destroys value with scale. Payback period adds timing — months to recover CAC from monthly gross profit per customer. SaaS targets under 12 months; consumer apps need under 3–6 given churn.
CAC payback math: monthly gross profit per customer equals ARPU times gross margin; payback equals CAC divided by that. With $300 LTV at 70% margin spread over 24 months ($8.75 monthly gross), a $100 CAC pays back in ~11.4 months. Shorten payback by raising prices, cutting acquisition cost, or improving activation-to-paid conversion.
Channel CACs differ structurally: paid search/social scale fast at rising marginal cost, content/SEO compounds cheaply over years, outbound SDR costs salaries regardless of yield, partnerships and referrals run cheapest but unscalably. Blended CAC hides channel truth — segment by source, kill losers, double winners, and watch marginal (not average) CAC on every budget increase.
Cohort and retention complete the picture: CAC is paid upfront while LTV accrues over months, so cash flow troughs before payback — the working-capital gap that kills growing startups. Fast payback plus high retention beats low CAC with churn; model cohorts, not averages.
Calculate CAC from marketing spend and customers acquired — see CAC, CAC payback and LTV to CAC. Formula: CAC = spend/customers. Example: With $10,000 spend for 100 customers: CAC $100.
Customer acquisition cost divides fully loaded sales-plus-marketing spend by new customers won: $10,000 for 100 customers is $100 CAC. The number alone means nothing — $100 CAC is superb for $1,000-LTV enterprise deals and fatal for $50-LTV consumers. Always pair CAC with lifetime value before judging.
Fully loaded means everything: ad spend, sales salaries and commissions, marketing tools, agency fees, content production, event costs and allocated overhead. Founders routinely undercount by 30–50% by including only media spend — the 'blended CAC' including all go-to-market cost is the honest figure investors use.
LTV:CAC ratio is the verdict metric: 3:1 or better signals healthy unit economics (each acquisition dollar returns three), 1:1 is treadmill, below 1 destroys value with scale. Payback period adds timing — months to recover CAC from monthly gross profit per customer. SaaS targets under 12 months; consumer apps need under 3–6 given churn.
CAC payback math: monthly gross profit per customer equals ARPU times gross margin; payback equals CAC divided by that. With $300 LTV at 70% margin spread over 24 months ($8.75 monthly gross), a $100 CAC pays back in ~11.4 months. Shorten payback by raising prices, cutting acquisition cost, or improving activation-to-paid conversion.
Channel CACs differ structurally: paid search/social scale fast at rising marginal cost, content/SEO compounds cheaply over years, outbound SDR costs salaries regardless of yield, partnerships and referrals run cheapest but unscalably. Blended CAC hides channel truth — segment by source, kill losers, double winners, and watch marginal (not average) CAC on every budget increase.
Cohort and retention complete the picture: CAC is paid upfront while LTV accrues over months, so cash flow troughs before payback — the working-capital gap that kills growing startups. Fast payback plus high retention beats low CAC with churn; model cohorts, not averages.
With $10,000 spend for 100 customers: CAC $100. With $300 LTV at 70% margin ($17.50 monthly gross over 12 months), payback is ~5.7 months and LTV:CAC is 3:1 — healthy SaaS economics. The same $100 CAC against $120 LTV (1.2:1) would be a scale-at-a-loss machine.
Formulas are standard public references (see our methodology). External standards are cited in the text where they apply.
Last reviewed: September 2026 · Report an error