Customer Acquisition Cost Calculator - CAC Marketing Spend

The customer acquisition cost calculator, or CAC calculator, divides go-to-market spend by the number of new customers won in the same period. CAC = (marketing costs + sales costs) / new customers acquired. A team that spends $10,000 on marketing and $5,000 on sales to win 300 customers has a CAC of $50. That fully loaded view is what finance teams use when they compare CAC with customer lifetime value (LTV). A paid-media-only CAC that ignores sales salaries will look cheaper than the economic cost of growth. Define the period and the customer event consistently. Count customers who became customers in that window, not total active users. Include ad spend, content, tools, agencies, sales compensation, and related overhead you want in the loaded number; exclude onboarding costs you treat as cost of service. Blended CAC mixes every channel. Paid CAC uses only paid spend and the customers those campaigns can claim. The calculator adds the two cost boxes you enter, so you control how loaded the figure is. Use cases include monthly board reporting, deciding whether a channel is scaling, and checking whether a discount campaign bought unprofitable customers. Pair CAC with gross margin and retention: a $200 CAC can be fine if LTV is $1,200 and poor if customers churn in two months. Recalculate when spend or volume changes, and avoid mixing a quarter of spend with a month of customers. Caveats: attribution is imperfect, especially with long sales cycles. Organic customers still consume brand spend. Recovered churned customers are sometimes counted as new, which understates CAC. This is an average, not a marginal cost for the next cohort. Confirm the inputs with the general ledger and CRM. Used with a matching LTV, the CAC calculator makes growth efficiency easier to review. Keep the period, cost definition, and new-customer rule in a note beside the result so next month's CAC is comparable rather than a new definition in disguise.