Customer Acquisition Cost Calculator
Calculate how much it costs to acquire each customer.
Essential for marketing budgets and unit economics.
Know your acquisition cost
Enter your marketing spend and customer data to calculate CAC and optimize your acquisition strategy.
What to include in CAC
For accurate CAC, include all costs related to acquiring customers—not just ad spend.
Include these costs
- • Paid advertising (Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.)
- • Sales team salaries and commissions
- • Marketing team salaries
- • Content creation and SEO costs
- • Marketing software and tools
- • Agency fees
Don't include
- • Product development costs
- • Customer support (post-acquisition)
- • General administrative costs
- • Infrastructure and hosting
- • Customer success (retention focused)
CAC benchmarks by industry
CAC varies wildly by industry and business model. Here are typical ranges.
Self-serve, lower touch
High touch, long sales cycle
Varies by product price
Regulated, trust-dependent
High volume, low intent
Relationship-driven
These are rough averages. Your CAC should always be evaluated relative to your LTV.
How to reduce your CAC
Improve targeting
Better audience targeting means less wasted ad spend. Use lookalike audiences, refine your ICP, and focus on channels where your customers actually are.
Optimize conversion rates
A higher conversion rate means more customers from the same spend. A/B test landing pages, improve your funnel, and reduce friction in signup.
Build referral loops
Referral customers have near-zero CAC. Build sharing mechanics, referral programs, and incentives that turn customers into acquisition channels.
Invest in organic
SEO, content marketing, and community building have high upfront costs but lower marginal CAC over time. They compound while paid doesn't.
Lower your CAC with viral waitlists
Waitlister's built-in referral system helps you acquire customers through word-of-mouth—the lowest CAC channel.
Do not sleep on this tool. I can have a CTA page up in 10-15 mins that encourages others to share via a soft referral system.
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