CAC Benchmarks by Industry
Customer acquisition cost has no universal benchmark, comparing a consumer app's CAC to an enterprise SaaS company's is meaningless when the two differ by a factor of a hundred. What matters is where you sit within your own segment and whether your lifetime value clears the ratio bar. This page assembles the CAC bands Revenue Map's financial models use across industries.
The spread is instructive. Consumer apps acquire customers for under $25 in the good band, e-commerce under $45, SMB SaaS under $300, and enterprise SaaS under $5,000, with each segment's poor threshold roughly three times its good one. Vertical-specific data stretches the range further: direct-to-consumer telehealth acquires patients at $30 to $80, self-serve edtech at $20 to $80, and B2B health platforms pay $5,000 to $25,000 per contract.
One discipline matters more than the benchmark itself: calculate fully loaded CAC. Counting only ad spend while ignoring salaries, tools, content production and agency fees understates true acquisition cost by 30% to 60%, which quietly flatters every downstream ratio. And expect drift: the cheapest customers come first, so plan for 20% to 30% CAC inflation year over year as channels saturate.
Benchmark Table
CAC benchmarks by industry segment
| Metric | Poor | Average | Good | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer app | Above $75 | $25 to $75 | Under $25 | Revenue Map benchmark tables |
| E-commerce | Above $120 | $45 to $120 | Under $45 | Revenue Map benchmark tables |
| SMB SaaS | Above $800 | $300 to $800 | Under $300 | Revenue Map benchmark tables |
| Enterprise SaaS | Above $15,000 | $5,000 to $15,000 | Under $5,000 | Revenue Map benchmark tables |
| DTC telehealth (per patient) | Above $80 | $30 to $80 | Under $30 | Revenue Map model templates |
| Self-serve B2C edtech | Above $80 | $20 to $80 | Under $20 | Revenue Map model templates |
| B2B health SaaS (per contract) | Above $25,000 | $5,000 to $25,000 | $2 to $10 per covered life | Revenue Map model templates |
| Subscription app CPI (iOS, pre-conversion) | Above $7 | $3 to $7 | Under $3 | Revenue Map benchmark tables |
Sources: Revenue Map benchmark tables (the thresholds behind our free calculators), Revenue Map model presets (default assumptions in our industry templates), and Revenue Map model templates (vertical research in each financial model). Ranges are screening bands, not guarantees.
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