CAC Calculator 🔒 Your data never leaves your browser.
Calculate customer acquisition cost, or customers affordable for a budget.
About this tool
This CAC calculator works in both directions. Enter your marketing spend and the number of new customers it brought in to get customer acquisition cost, or switch to reverse mode and enter a budget plus a known CAC to see how many customers that budget could bring in. The maths is deliberately simple and transparent: CAC is marketing spend ÷ new customers, and the reverse mode just solves that same equation for customers.
A CAC number means very little on its own — it only becomes useful once you compare it against customer lifetime value (LTV), the total revenue a customer generates over the time they stay with you. A commonly cited rule of thumb is that a healthy business wants an LTV:CAC ratio of at least 3:1, so that each customer is worth roughly three times what it cost to acquire them once servicing costs and churn are factored in. So rather than asking whether a given CAC is "high" or "low" in isolation, weigh it against what a customer is actually worth over their lifetime. Everything runs locally in your browser — the figures you enter never leave your device.
Frequently asked questions
Should CAC include salaries of the sales/marketing team, or just ad spend?
A "fully loaded" CAC — the more rigorous and widely recommended version — includes everything spent to acquire customers: ad spend, salaries and commissions for sales and marketing staff, tools/software, and even a share of overhead. This calculator's "marketing spend" input can be either figure depending on what you enter — for a quick, rough estimate ad spend alone is common, but if you're comparing CAC against customer lifetime value to judge whether your growth is actually profitable, using the fully-loaded figure gives a far more honest answer.