You will not be allowed to compare more than 4 products at a time
View compareThe Finance Library
Customer Acquisition Cost
CAC Calculator
What is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)? CAC is the total cost a business incurs to win one new paying customer. It captures every dollar spent on marketing, sales, and related overhead during a given period, divided by the number of new customers acquired in that same period. CAC matters because it sets the floor on how valuable a customer must be to make the business viable — a customer is only worth acquiring if the profit they generate over their lifetime exceeds what it cost to win them. CAC is most powerful when paired with Customer Lifetime Value (CLTV): the ratio of CLTV to CAC is one of the most watched metrics in growth businesses, with 3:1 widely cited as the minimum healthy threshold. This calculator supports two modes: a simple mode for a quick total-cost calculation, and a channel breakdown mode that lets you analyse spend and efficiency across different marketing and sales channels — helping you understand not just what your CAC is, but where it is coming from and where it can be improved.
Step 1 — Total sales & marketing costs
Add up every cost directly related to winning new customers during the period you are measuring. The more inclusive you are, the more accurate your CAC will be.
All paid advertising — digital ads, search, social, display, print, events, sponsorships. Include platform fees and creative production costs if they are part of the campaign budget.
$
Salaries, benefits, commissions, and contractor fees for everyone in sales and marketing whose time is dedicated to acquiring new customers. If some team members split time between acquisition and retention, include only the acquisition-focused proportion.
$
CRM subscriptions, marketing automation platforms, analytics tools, SEO software, email platforms — any technology used primarily to find and convert new customers.
$
Copywriting, design, video production, photography, and agency retainers used to produce acquisition-focused content. Exclude content created purely for existing customer engagement.
$
Referral programme costs, partnership fees, trade show attendance, outbound prospecting tools, or any other spend whose primary purpose is acquiring new customers.
$
Total acquisition spend
$0
Step 2 — New customers acquired
Count only genuinely new customers — first-time buyers or subscribers. Reactivated lapsed customers are sometimes included; be consistent with your definition across periods so your CAC trends are comparable.
Optional — CLTV & period context
These inputs are optional but unlock additional metrics — including the LTV:CAC ratio and payback period analysis.
The net profit expected from a single customer over their full relationship with your business. Use the CLTV calculator in The Finance Library to derive this figure.
$
The time window for this calculation. All spend and new-customer counts should cover the same period.
months
The percentage of revenue that remains after direct cost of serving each customer. Used to calculate the CAC payback period — how many months of gross profit it takes to recover the acquisition cost.
%
Common benchmarks:
Used with gross margin to calculate the CAC payback period in months. For transactional businesses, enter average monthly revenue per customer (annual revenue ÷ 12).
$
CAC payback = CAC ÷ (ARPA × gross margin). This tells you how many months of revenue it takes to recover your acquisition spend — a key operational metric for cash flow planning.
LTV : CAC health check
—
0× (losing money)
1×
3× (benchmark)
5×+