Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Calculator

About this calculator

This calculator divides total sales and marketing spend by the number of new customers acquired in that period — CAC = spend / new customers — a core SaaS and e-commerce metric for understanding how much it actually costs to win one paying customer.

Startups and growth teams track CAC alongside customer lifetime value (LTV) to judge whether an acquisition channel is profitable (a healthy LTV:CAC ratio is often cited as 3:1 or higher), marketers use it to compare the efficiency of different campaigns or channels, and investors use it as a due-diligence metric when evaluating a company's growth economics. The calculator's straightforward division makes clear how sensitive CAC is to what's included in "spend" — ad costs alone, versus ad costs plus salaries and tools, can produce very different numbers for the same business.