CAC Calculator | Customer Acquisition Cost & LTV:CAC Ratio

CAC is the average cost to acquire one new customer: total sales and marketing spend for a period, divided by the number of new customers gained in that same period. It is one of the most important efficiency metrics for any business that spends money to grow.

There is no universal 'good' CAC — it depends entirely on what a customer is worth to you. A $200 CAC is excellent for a customer worth $2,000 in lifetime value, but unsustainable for a customer worth $150. Compare CAC against Customer Lifetime Value (LTV) using the LTV:CAC ratio rather than judging CAC in isolation.

A ratio of 3:1 or higher is a commonly cited healthy target for subscription and e-commerce businesses — meaning a customer is worth at least 3 times what it cost to acquire them. A ratio below 1:1 means you are losing money on every customer. A very high ratio (5:1+) can also signal you are under-investing in growth relative to what you could profitably spend.

Include all sales and marketing spend for the period: advertising spend, sales and marketing salaries and commissions, marketing tools and software, agency or contractor fees, and content or creative production costs. Excluding some of these costs will understate your true CAC.

Common approaches include improving targeting to reduce wasted ad spend, increasing conversion rates on your website or landing pages, growing organic and referral channels (which have near-zero marginal cost), and testing which channels produce the lowest CAC so you can shift budget toward them.

Yes. In guest mode you can export your calculations to JSON. Signing in adds PDF and CSV export. Click the export button to download your results — useful for record-keeping, sharing, or importing into other tools.

Yes. Your calculation history is saved automatically. As a guest you can keep up to 50 calculations per workspace on your device. Sign in for free to keep up to 100 per workspace and access them from any device.

Yes. The CAC Calculator is free to use with no sign-up required. A free account adds more calculation history, multiple workspaces, and access to your saved data from any device.