Sjo

Free local no account

Is each customer worth what you pay for them?

Enter revenue per customer, gross margin, churn and what you spend to win a customer. See lifetime value, your LTV to CAC ratio and how long it takes to earn the acquisition cost back.

Lifetime value$2,107gross profit per customer
LTV : CAC3.5 : 1Healthy
CAC payback9.5 monthsto earn back acquisition cost
Max sensible CAC$702to stay at 3 : 1

Sjo · AI executive

Is the problem the cost to acquire, or the customers you keep?

Sjo connects acquisition spend, pricing and churn to your runway, and tells you which lever to pull first: raise prices, cut a channel, or fix retention.

Free Sjo shows you what's happening. Paid Sjo helps you decide what to do about it.

How LTV and CAC are calculated

Lifetime value
(revenue per customer × gross margin) ÷ monthly churn
CAC
sales + marketing spend ÷ new customers won
LTV : CAC
lifetime value ÷ CAC
CAC payback
CAC ÷ (revenue per customer × gross margin)

What is a good LTV to CAC ratio?

The usual rule of thumb is 3 : 1 or better: each customer earns three times what it cost to win them. Below 1 : 1 you lose money on every customer. Between 1 and 3, growth works but is expensive.

Well above 5 : 1 sounds great, but often means you could spend more on acquisition and grow faster without hurting the economics.

Why use gross margin, not revenue?

A customer paying you $100 a month who costs $30 to serve only gives you $70 to pay back what you spent acquiring them. Using revenue instead of gross profit overstates lifetime value, sometimes by a lot.

What is a good CAC payback period?

Under 12 months is generally considered strong for small-business SaaS. Bootstrapped companies usually need shorter payback than funded ones, because the cash spent on acquisition has to come back before it can be spent again.

An early-stage caveat

With only a few months of data, churn is noisy, and lifetime value is just 1 ÷ churn, so small changes swing it a lot. Treat early LTV as a range and watch CAC payback, which needs no churn estimate at all.