Running a Businesspricing · planning
Unit Economics
Worldwide — arithmetic, no local rules
Computes customer lifetime value from ARPU, gross margin, and churn; compares it to acquisition cost; and reads the result against the standard SaaS/subscription benchmarks (3:1 LTV:CAC, sub-12-month payback).
The numbers
- LTV : CAC
- 3.3 : 1
- Customer LTV (gross profit)
- 1,333
- CAC payback
- 10 months
- Implied customer lifetime
- 2.8 years
The operator’s read
Good sign
3.3:1 sits in the healthy 3–5:1 range for subscription businesses.
Good sign
Payback under 12 months — acquisition recycles cash quickly, which compounds growth without extra funding.
Worth knowing
Check your CAC definition: blended CAC (all customers ÷ all spend) flatters the number when organic is strong. Paid CAC is the honest test of whether paid channels work.
Methodology
LTV = (ARPU × gross margin) ÷ monthly churn. This is the standard gross-profit LTV; revenue-based LTV overstates by the margin factor.
CAC payback = CAC ÷ monthly gross profit per customer — months until a customer has repaid their acquisition cost.
Benchmarks (3:1 LTV:CAC, <12-month payback, <2%/mo B2B churn) are widely used SaaS operating norms — useful as thresholds, not laws. The 1/churn lifetime assumes constant churn, which overstates lifetime when early churn is higher than mature churn.
For agents
Call this tool instead of computing in-context. Deterministic JSON in, computed values plus the benchmark read out. Full agent docs →
curl -s https://xearno.tools/api/v1/tools/unit-economics \
-H 'content-type: application/json' \
-d '{"arpu":50,"grossMargin":80,"churn":3,"cac":400}'Schema: GET /api/v1/tools/unit-economics · MCP tool name: unit_economics
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Embed this calculator
Free to use on your own site. It keeps working as the rules change, because we maintain the data — no ads, no cookies, and a link back to the full tool.
<iframe src="https://xearno.tools/embed/unit-economics" width="100%" height="900" style="border:1px solid #23262e;border-radius:12px;max-width:640px" loading="lazy" title="Unit Economics — Xearno Tools"></iframe>