Free tools / CAC calculator
Free toolCAC calculator
What does it actually cost you to win one new customer? Most founders guess at this number. It is the one that decides whether growth makes you money or quietly drains it.
Your numbers
Nothing you type here is stored.
Your acquisition cost will appear here
Fill in what you spent and how many customers you won, then press Calculate.
What would move this number
Now find out what a customer is worth: LTV calculator, then compare the two with the LTV to CAC calculator.
How this works
The formula
CAC = total sales and marketing spend ÷ new customers
Spend 3,000,000 in a month and win 300 customers, and each one cost you 10,000. That is the whole calculation. The judgement is in deciding what counts as acquisition spend.
The number on its own is useless
A CAC of 10,000 is excellent if a customer is worth 200,000 and catastrophic if they are worth 5,000. Nobody can tell you whether your CAC is good without knowing your LTV. That is why these two tools sit next to each other.
What this does and does not tell you
- It counts the spend you enter. If your sales salaries are buried in general payroll and you leave them out, your real CAC is higher than this.
- It treats every customer as equal. If you win one large account and fifty small ones, a blended CAC hides more than it shows.
- It measures the period you chose. Acquisition spend often pays off months later, so a single month can flatter or punish you unfairly.
- It does not include the cost of keeping customers, only of winning them.
Questions people ask
Everything you spend to turn a stranger into a customer. Advertising, content, events, agency fees, sales salaries and commission, and the software your sales and marketing people use. What you exclude is the cost of serving customers you already have. The most common mistake is leaving out salaries, which can easily double the real figure.
Count them in the customer number, yes. They are real customers. That will pull your average CAC down, which is honest, because word of mouth genuinely is cheaper acquisition. If a large share of your growth is referral, it is worth calculating CAC both with and without them, because the paid channel number tells you what happens when you scale.
Very. Spend and results rarely land in the same month, so a campaign paid for in January may deliver customers in March. If your numbers swing, use a quarter rather than a month. The trend over several periods tells you far more than any single figure.
There is no universal answer, and anyone who gives you one without asking about your business is guessing. The only real test is CAC against lifetime value and against how long you wait to get the money back. Both of those have their own calculator here.
Knowing what a customer costs is step one.
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