Customer Acquisition Cost Calculator
What Does a New Customer Actually Cost?
Every dollar spent on ads, sales salaries, and marketing tools exists to bring in customers — but until that spend is divided by the number of customers it actually produced, it's just a budget line, not a metric. Customer acquisition cost turns marketing and sales spend into a single, comparable per-customer figure that can be tracked over time or measured against what each customer is worth.
The Formula
CAC = Total Sales & Marketing Cost / Number of New Customers Acquired
Where This Calculation Matters
- Channel comparison — calculating CAC separately for each acquisition channel (paid search, social, referral) to see which is actually efficient.
- Budgeting — projecting how many new customers a given marketing budget can realistically produce.
- Fundraising — investors routinely ask for CAC alongside lifetime value as a pair of numbers that describe unit economics.
- Pricing sanity checks — if CAC exceeds what a customer pays in their first transaction, the business needs repeat purchases to recover the cost.
Note: CAC is only half the picture. It needs to be compared against customer lifetime value (LTV) to know whether the acquisition spend is actually paying off — a low CAC on customers who churn immediately can still be a losing formula.
How to Use This Calculator
- Enter Total Sales & Marketing Cost ($) for the period being measured.
- Enter the Number of New Customers Acquired during that same period.
- Select Calculate to see the cost to acquire a single customer.
Related Calculations
Compare this figure against the Lifetime Value Calculator to check unit economics, or track how many of those customers stick around with the Churn Rate Calculator.