Marketing ROI & budget calculator
Work out your break-even ROAS, the most you can profitably pay for a customer, and whether a channel at your current conversion rate can ever make money. No email required.
Enter your numbers
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Projected outcome at these inputs
- Actual CAC
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- Revenue generated
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- Gross profit
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- Profit after media
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- Achieved ROAS
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- Verdict
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This is a single-channel model with no allowance for returns, discounts, shipping or overheads. Treat it as a directional sanity check, not a forecast.
How to read these numbers
Break-even ROAS equals 1 divided by your gross margin expressed as a decimal. A business with a 40% gross margin has a break-even ROAS of 2.5 — it must generate $2.50 of revenue per $1 of ad spend simply to cover cost of goods. Anything above that contributes to overheads and profit. This is why any ROAS benchmark quoted without reference to margin is meaningless.
Break-even ROAS
This is the floor, not the target. Clearing break-even means you covered the cost of the goods and the media, and nothing else — no rent, no salaries, no software, no profit. A useful working target is break-even plus 40 to 60 percent, though the right number depends on how much of your overhead is fixed.
Maximum profitable CAC
The most you can pay to acquire a customer while still making money over your chosen payback window. The single biggest lever here is expected orders per customer: a business that gets 1.8 orders per customer can pay almost twice what a single-purchase business can, from identical margins. This is why retention work so often beats acquisition work.
If the verdict says loss-making
Three levers, in order of usual effectiveness. First, conversion rate — a 20 percent improvement costs nothing per visit thereafter and applies to every channel at once. Second, average order value through bundling or minimum-spend thresholds. Third, repeat purchase rate through lifecycle marketing. Cutting cost per click is the fourth lever and usually the weakest, because the auction sets a floor you do not control.
Key takeaways
- Break-even ROAS = 1 ÷ gross margin. Every benchmark you read is meaningless without this.
- Repeat purchase rate is the strongest lever on what you can afford to pay for a customer.
- Conversion rate improvements compound across every channel simultaneously.
What this calculator does not include
Returns, refunds, discount codes, shipping subsidies, payment processing, marketplace fees and overhead allocation. In categories with high return rates — apparel is the obvious case — the real picture can be substantially worse than this model suggests. If you want a version modelled on your actual numbers, that is exactly what the first half of our audit produces.
Want this modelled on your real numbers?
Send us your margin, returns and repeat-rate data and we will build the actual model — including the fees this calculator ignores.