Market size, startup costs, break-even, pricing, margins, customer cost, payroll, insurance, funding and the hard growth calls — test every idea against honest maths before you spend real money on it. The full detailed report costs less than a coffee: $2.95.
Customer acquisition cost is the number that separates businesses that scale from businesses that quietly subsidise strangers. The maths is simple — total marketing and sales spend divided by new paying customers gained — but the discipline is not: undercounting the time, tools and discounts spent on acquisition is how startups fool themselves into growth that loses money. This calculator returns your true CAC, then compares it against the average lifetime profit a customer brings. Above a three-to-one ratio the engine works; below one-and-a-half, every new customer is a small step backwards, no matter how fast the dashboard grows.
Work out what each new paying customer actually costs you to acquire — and compare it with what they are worth, before marketing eats the business.
Roughly 3:1 — a customer should be worth about three times what it costs to win them. Between 1.5 and 3 the model needs work; below 1.5 the unit economics are losing and more marketing makes it worse.
Because ads are only part of it. Count the salaries of whoever sells, the tools, the discounts and the free samples. And count paying customers — not leads, signups or followers, which cost money and produce nothing.
Raise prices or improve retention first — both lift lifetime value directly and are cheaper than cutting marketing. Then re-test per channel, because the blended number hides which channel is the problem.
Every tool answers instantly from our own knowledge base and calculators — no AI cost, no waiting, no account. Want the deeper, personalised version? Each has a $2.95 full report.