CAC Calculator: Paid, Blended and Fully Loaded

Calculate customer acquisition cost three ways from one set of inputs: paid, blended and fully loaded. See CAC by channel with shared costs allocated, payback and LTV to CAC from your margin and churn, and CAC by month with a lag for your sales cycle.

Live v1.0 · November 2026 Free · No signupBy channel and by monthNothing sent
Acquisition cost Paid · blended · loaded
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Channels: spend and new customers in the period
Spend is what the channel itself costs: media, sponsorships, content production.
Direct, unknown, word of mouth.
Shared sales and marketing costs in the same period
Sales and marketing people, including employer costs.
Office, equipment, management time.
Unit economics, for payback and LTV
Share of customers lost each month.
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Customer acquisition cost ·

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What this CAC calculator does differently

Customer acquisition cost is one division: what you spent to win customers, over the customers you won. The arguments start with what goes on top. A paid CAC that counts only media and a fully loaded CAC that counts salaries and tools can differ several times over for the same company and month, and most calculators return one number without saying which it is.

MailmodoSleeknoteProspeoThis tool
InputsOne cost, one customer countCampaign cost, customersTotal cost, or a line-item builderSpend and customers per channel, plus shared costs
Paid, blended and fully loadedOne CACOne CACBlended and fully loaded explained in the textAll three, side by side
CAC by channelNoSuggested in the textExplained, with benchmarksCalculated, direct and with shared costs allocated
Payback and LTV:CACNoNoLTV:CAC; payback as a formula onlyBoth, from margin and churn
Sales cycle lagNoNoAdvice on rolling windowsMonthly mode with a 0 to 6 month lag
ExportNoneNoneTemplate link that does not workCSV, Markdown, share link

Calculator pages as fetched on 1 November 2026. Anything not shown or described on the page is not counted.

Paid, blended and fully loaded CAC

  • Paid CAC divides paid channel spend by the customers those channels brought in. It is the number ad platforms make easy, and the one that makes paid acquisition look cheapest.
  • Blended CAC divides all channel spend by all new customers, including those who came direct or by word of mouth. Organic customers pull it down, which is why it can hide a paid channel that is getting more expensive.
  • Fully loaded CAC adds the people and tools behind acquisition: sales and marketing salaries and commission, software, agencies and a share of overhead. It is the number to use for payback and for deciding whether growth pays for itself.

None of the three is wrong. The mistake is comparing one company’s paid CAC with another’s fully loaded CAC, or this quarter’s blended figure with last quarter’s paid one. This page shows all three from the same inputs so the gap between them is visible.

CAC by channel, and the shared costs

Channel CAC divides what a channel costs by the customers it brought in. Direct channel CAC uses only the channel’s own spend. Loaded channel CAC adds a share of the shared costs, split by each channel’s share of new customers or of spend. Splitting by customers treats the team’s time as following the customers it serves; splitting by spend treats it as following the budget. Neither is exact, and the choice is shown with the result.

Organic channels are not free. Content, SEO and community cost writers, editors and tools, and putting those costs on the organic row is what makes its CAC comparable with paid search. For the longer view of what organic search returns, the SaaS SEO ROI calculator models the lag and the compounding.

The lag between spend and customers

Dividing this month’s spend by this month’s customers assumes customers arrive in the month they were paid for. With a sales cycle of weeks or months they do not: spend rises in March, customers arrive in May, and March’s CAC looks terrible while May’s looks excellent. The monthly mode shifts spend forward by the lag you choose, matching each month’s customers to the spend that most likely produced them, and adds a rolling three-month CAC that smooths single-month swings.

Payback and LTV to CAC

CAC on its own does not say whether acquisition is worth it. Payback does: the months of gross margin a customer needs to repay what it cost to acquire them, CAC divided by monthly revenue per customer times gross margin. Lifetime value here is the simple steady-state version, monthly gross margin per customer divided by monthly churn, and LTV to CAC divides it by the fully loaded CAC.

Treat LTV with care. It assumes churn stays where it is today and ignores expansion revenue and the time value of money, so payback is usually the more useful of the two. This page does not quote a “good” CAC or ratio: published benchmarks mix paid, blended and fully loaded definitions, and a benchmark in the wrong definition is worse than none.

How to calculate CAC with this tool

  1. Choose the periodUse a full month or quarter, and the same period for costs and customers.
  2. Enter each channelAdd each channel’s own spend and the new customers attributed to it, and mark it paid, organic or other.
  3. Add customers with no channelDirect, unknown and word of mouth count in blended and fully loaded CAC.
  4. Add shared costsSales and marketing salaries and commission, software, agencies and allocated overhead.
  5. Add unit economicsRevenue per customer per month, gross margin and monthly churn give payback and LTV.
  6. Check the lagSwitch to monthly totals and set the months from spend to customer to see CAC by month.

Frequently asked questions

Divide the sales and marketing cost of a period by the number of new customers won in the same period. Which costs you include decides whether it is paid, blended or fully loaded CAC, so state the definition with the number.
Paid CAC divides paid channel spend by customers from paid channels. Blended CAC divides all channel spend by all new customers, including organic and direct ones, which usually makes it lower.
CAC that includes the people and tools behind acquisition as well as channel spend: sales and marketing salaries and commission, software, agencies and allocated overhead, divided by all new customers in the period.
For fully loaded CAC, yes, including employer costs and commission. Leaving them out is fine for comparing ad channels, but the result then understates what a customer really costs to win.
The months of gross margin a customer takes to repay their acquisition cost: CAC divided by monthly revenue per customer times gross margin. Shorter payback means growth needs less cash up front.
A ratio of 3 to 1 is often quoted, but it depends on how LTV and CAC were defined and how reliable the churn figure is. Payback in months is usually the more useful check.
Divide each channel’s own spend by the new customers attributed to it. To compare channels fairly, add a share of shared costs to each, split by customers or by spend; this calculator shows both direct and loaded figures.
Usually because customers arrive weeks or months after the spend that produced them. Use a lag that matches your sales cycle, or a rolling three-month CAC, instead of same-month figures.