Free calculator
What it costs to win a customer, how much of that the first order pays back, and how long the rest takes at the repeat rate you actually observe.
Paid back on the first order
150,4%of CAC covered
27Blended CAC
€29,70
spend ÷ new customers
Orders to payback
0,66
at this contribution
29Year one, net of CAC
€55,19
at the observed repeat rate
What a customer brings back
An observed ratio from your own orders, never a predicted lifetime: orders divided by customers over a period you can check.
↑ ↓ to nudge, Shift for ten. Commas or dots both work.
Everything here is blended and observed: no attribution model, no prediction. The repeat rate is orders divided by customers over a period you measured, which makes the payback a fact about last year rather than a forecast about next. The cohort version, lifetime value by first-order month, is the LTV tab inside nouz.
It costs €29,70 to win a customer whose first order contributes €44,68. The business funds its own growth, and every repeat order after that is margin.
An estimate from flat rates. In nouz every order is priced from the costs of its own day.
A CAC payback calculator divides ad spend by new customers to get a blended acquisition cost, then asks how much of it the first order's contribution covers. Where it does not cover it, the calculator reports the orders and months needed at your observed repeat rate.
The formula
Software can wait a year to recover an acquisition cost because serving a customer costs almost nothing. A store cannot: the next order needs stock, and the stock has to be bought before the customer returns. So the question that decides whether growth funds itself is whether the FIRST order’s contribution covers what winning the customer cost.
Contribution, not revenue. Revenue includes the goods, the parcel and the fees, none of which pay anything back. Measuring payback against revenue is how a store concludes it recovers acquisition immediately when it recovers half of it.
Everything here is blended: total spend over total new customers, with no platform attributing anything to itself. And the repeat rate is an observed ratio from your own orders, not a predicted lifetime, which keeps the answer a fact about what happened rather than a forecast about what might.
Where it goes wrong
Each of these makes acquisition look cheaper or the return look quicker than it is.
An €85 order does not pay back €85 of acquisition cost. It pays back what survives the goods, the parcel and the fee, which on typical economics is around half of it. Revenue-based payback is the single commonest error in this arithmetic.
Every platform claims the customers it can see, and the claims overlap, so per-platform CAC figures are always flattering and never add up. Total spend over total new customers is the only version that cannot double count.
Category benchmarks are not your customers. The ratio you need is your own orders divided by your own customers over a period long enough to include real repeat behaviour, and it is usually lower than the industry article suggested.
A twelve-month payback is a twelve-month loan to yourself, and the reorders happen in between. That is why a store can be profitable per customer and out of cash at the same time, and why the first-order threshold matters more here than in software.
Worked example
The calculator’s defaults, on the example store: €15.000 of ad spend won 505 new customers in the month, each first order contributing €44,68 after goods, fulfilment and fees, and customers placing 1,9 orders a year.
That is €29,70 to win a customer, against €44,68 of contribution on the very first order.
This store funds its own growth: the first order covers the acquisition cost half again over, so every additional customer adds cash rather than consuming it, and the €55,19 of year-one contribution net of acquisition is what pays the rent.
Push CAC to €75 by scaling into colder audiences and the picture inverts: the first order recovers 60% of it, the rest waits for repeat orders that take 10,6 months to cover it, and the store is financing its own growth from working capital.
In the app
A calculator works from flat rates you type once. nouz prices every single order from the cost rules that were in force on that order's own date, and rebuilds the same statement every night from your own orders and your own ad spend.
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Each one is a different question about the same statement. All 32 are free, and none of them asks you to sign up.
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The long version
Want the long version rather than the arithmetic?
The floorMER 1,90below it, ads buy losses11 min readAds eating your profit? Find your MER floor before you cutSpend is up, profit is down, and every platform claims success. Find your blended MER floor, separate the marginal euro from the average, and cut in the right order.Ads eating your profitnouz computes blended CAC and what a first order actually contributes from your own orders and costs, so the threshold that decides whether growth funds itself is a number you can read every morning.