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Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) Calculator

Find what it costs to acquire one customer.

How it is calculated

Customer acquisition cost is what you paid, on average, to win one new customer: CAC = total spend ÷ new customers. Total spend is the sales and marketing money for the period (ads, tools, salaries, commissions if you include them) in one currency, and new customers is the number who actually bought for the first time in the same period. The result is shown as a currency amount with two decimals. The number of customers must be above zero; with zero the tool gives no result. Returning customers should not be counted.

Worked example

In one month a shop spends 5000 on ads and related costs and gains 80 new customers. Divide spend by customers: 5000 ÷ 80 = $62.50. Each new customer therefore cost 62.50 to acquire, which you can compare with the profit a customer brings over their lifetime.

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Common mistakes

  • Dividing by all orders instead of only first-time customers. Repeat buyers make CAC look cheaper than it is.
  • Using spend from one month and customers from another. Campaigns often convert with a delay, so keep periods aligned or use a longer window.
  • Leaving out salaries, agency fees or tool costs in some periods but not others, so the figures are not comparable.
  • Reading CAC on its own. A low CAC is not good if each customer brings less profit than they cost.

Sources

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.

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Comments (1)

  • Editorial team

    The result is only as honest as the spend you count. It is easy to count ad budgets but leave out salaries of the sales or marketing team, agency fees and tools, which makes acquisition look cheaper than it was. Use the same period for both spend and new customers, and count only first-time buyers. The figure becomes useful once you set it beside the gross profit one customer brings. Which costs do you include in your own spend?

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