Calculate your customer acquisition cost and find out if it makes you wince. Enter your marketing spend, sales costs, and new customers to get an honest look at what each customer actually costs you.
CAC is the single most lied-about metric in SaaS. Not because people are dishonest — they just forget to count things. Here's how to do it right.
CAC = (Total Sales & Marketing Spend) / (New Customers Acquired)
The hard part isn't the math — it's deciding what counts as "spend." If you exclude sales salaries because "they'd be there anyway," you're lying to yourself. Include everything: ad spend, content costs, agency fees, sales salaries, commissions, tools, events, even the coffee at trade shows.
| CAC Driver | Impact | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Long sales cycles | High | Better qualification, demo optimization |
| Low conversion rates | High | Landing page CRO, lead scoring |
| Expensive channels | Medium | Shift budget to organic/content |
| Poor targeting | High | Tighter ICP, better ad audiences |
| No attribution | Medium | Multi-touch attribution setup |
Blended CAC is useful, but channel-level CAC is where the decisions get made. If your paid CAC is $8,000 and your organic CAC is $800, that tells you where to double down. The companies that win aren't the ones who spend the most — they're the ones who know exactly which dollars are working. See how we optimize channel mix for SaaS companies →
