CAC calculator.
Customer acquisition cost calculator for SaaS and subscription products. Two modes: simple totals (sales + marketing spend ÷ customers) or full per-channel breakdown with paid vs organic attribution. Optional ARPA and margin unlock the LTV:CAC ratio and CAC payback period in real time. Mobile-friendly, runs in your browser, nothing uploads.
pair with: clv calculator
· quick scenarios (overwrites inputs)
· your inputs
Spend + customers, per channel, per month
· optional: for LTV:CAC + CAC payback
Add ARPA and gross margin and the calculator works out whether your CAC is healthy in context. Without these, you just see the CAC number itself.
per month
0-100
· your numbers
Blended CAC
$158.33
total spend ÷ all customers
Paid CAC
$200
paid spend ÷ paid customers
LTV:CAC
12.01:1
3:1 is the SaaS benchmark
· channel breakdown
| channel | spend | customers | cac |
|---|---|---|---|
| Paid ads paid | $8,000 | 60 | $133.33 |
| Content / SEO organic | $4,000 | 30 | $133.33 |
| Outbound sales paid | $6,000 | 10 | $600 |
| Partnerships / referrals organic | $1,000 | 20 | $50 |
· health checks
- goodLTV:CAC 12.01:1
At or above the 3:1 SaaS benchmark. Acquisition is paying back well; room to scale spend.
- goodCAC payback 2.0 months
Under a year. You recycle acquisition spend fast: capital-efficient growth.
- info12.0x spread between cheapest and priciest channel
Partnerships / referrals acquires customers at $50 each; Outbound sales at $600. Before optimizing the priciest, check whether it's also bringing higher-value customers (different ARPA, lower churn).
What counts as sales spend and what counts as marketing spend
Sales spend is anything tied to closing a deal: sales-team salaries and commissions, sales tooling (CRM, outbound sequencer, sales intelligence), sales-led event costs, and the portion of the founder's time if you're early-stage and the founder is selling. Marketing spend is everything that fills the top of the funnel: paid ads, content production, SEO costs, sponsorships, email tools, marketing salaries, and design.
Things that aren't in CAC: product development cost, customer success and support after activation, infrastructure (hosting, compute), engineering. Those are cost of goods or operating expense, not acquisition cost. If you include them you'll overstate CAC and underprice growth investment.
CAC in context: the three numbers that decide if it's healthy
- LTV:CAC ratio. Lifetime gross profit per customer divided by CAC. Target 3:1 or better. Under 1:1 means you're losing money on every customer. Over 5:1 may mean you're under-investing in growth.
- CAC payback period. Months for gross profit per customer to recover acquisition cost. Under 12 months is best, 12-24 is typical, 24+ is a yellow flag.
- Channel mix. Are you over-dependent on one source? If 70%+ of customers come from one channel, an algorithm change or platform policy shift can crater acquisition overnight.
The calculator surfaces all three when you provide enough inputs. For the full unit economics picture, use the CLV calculator alongside this one: it computes LTV from ARPA, churn, and margin with all three CLV variants (simple, gross-margin, NPV).
FAQ
What is CAC and how do I calculate it?
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is the total spend required to acquire one paying customer. Formula: (sales spend + marketing spend) ÷ new customers in the same period. Sales spend includes salaries, commissions, and sales tools. Marketing spend includes ads, content production, SEO costs, event sponsorships, and marketing tools. New customers means net-new paying customers (don't count expansions or trial signups that didn't convert). The result is your blended CAC.
What's the difference between blended CAC and paid CAC?
Blended CAC divides total spend by ALL customers, including ones that came organically (word of mouth, organic search, referrals). Paid CAC divides paid spend only by customers attributed to paid channels. Blended makes your CAC look better than it is for ad-spend decisions (because organic customers shouldn't get credit for ad spend). Paid CAC is the number you use when deciding whether to scale paid acquisition. Most teams report blended publicly and use paid internally.
How do I track CAC by channel? Is the breakdown worth it?
Yes, especially once paid spend exceeds ~$5k/month. Per-channel CAC tells you which channels are efficient and which are bleeding cash. The hard part is attribution: a customer might have seen a paid ad, then read a blog post, then heard from a friend, then signed up. Multi-touch attribution is a whole rabbit hole. For most teams, last-touch attribution (give credit to the last channel before signup) is a reasonable approximation. Just be consistent: pick one attribution model and stick with it across periods.
What's a healthy CAC for SaaS?
CAC in isolation is meaningless; it only matters relative to customer value. A $500 CAC is great if customers stay 4 years at $100/month (LTV $4,800 at 100% margin), terrible if customers churn after 3 months at $50/month (LTV $150). The single best benchmark is the LTV:CAC ratio. The accepted target is 3:1 or better, meaning lifetime gross profit is at least 3x acquisition cost. Add ARPA and gross margin to this calculator and it will compute that ratio for you.
How long should CAC payback take?
Under 12 months is capital-efficient: you recycle your acquisition spend fast and can scale without external capital. 12-24 months is typical B2B SaaS, manageable with reserves. Over 24 months is the danger zone: customers can churn before recovering acquisition cost, which means net losses per customer at scale. The math: CAC payback = CAC ÷ (ARPA × gross margin). The calculator computes this when you provide ARPA and margin.
What does the 'one channel concentration' warning mean?
If a single channel produces more than 70% of your new customers, you have concentration risk. Algorithm changes (Google updates, iOS privacy changes), ad cost spikes, key salesperson departures, or platform policy shifts can crater that channel overnight. The warning flags this so you can diversify before scaling. Diversification doesn't mean splitting equally; it means having a backup channel that can grow if the primary one stalls.
Should I worry about a 5x spread between my cheapest and most expensive channels?
Not automatically. A 5x CAC spread could mean the expensive channel is bringing higher-value customers (longer-lived, higher-ARPA, lower-churn enterprise accounts vs. cheap-CAC SMB accounts) that justify the cost. Look at LTV:CAC by channel, not just CAC by channel. Only optimize away high-CAC channels when their LTV:CAC ratio is genuinely worse than alternatives. The calculator surfaces the spread for review; the decision is contextual.
Where does my data go?
Nowhere outside your browser. The calculator runs entirely client-side. Inputs are kept in your browser's LocalStorage so they're there when you return, but that data stays on your device. No spend numbers, no customer counts, no scenario data ever leaves the browser. The page makes no network request when you change inputs.
SaaS unit economics suite: CLV / LTV:CAC calculator, AI cost calculator (per-model API cost projections), and the freelance rate calculator (for solo operators working backwards from a salary target).