What you could be paying to acquire a customer, based on your own cohort data and unit economics. Pick a tab below to switch lenses.
Based on Matt Putra's eightx Max CAC framework. Drop your cohort export and P&L numbers in to see where you are vs. where you could be.
Question: Should I lift my ad budget? Ad spend ÷ all new customers acquired. This is the marginal decision lens — it's what you should look at when deciding whether to spend more.
| Current period | Prior period | YoY | TTM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ad spend ($) | ||||
| New customers | ||||
| CAC | — | — | — | — |
Question: Is the marketing program paying for itself? Total marketing OPEX (ads + marketing payroll + SaaS + agency + everything you'd cut if you cut marketing) divided by new customers. This view is more conservative than ad-only.
| Current period | Prior period | YoY | TTM | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total marketing ($) | ||||
| New customers | ||||
| CAC | — | — | — | — |
Pull these from your P&L. Variable Margin = Gross Margin − (Shipping + Payment + Influencer + Other). This is the margin per order AFTER fulfillment costs but BEFORE fixed costs like payroll, marketing, and overhead — it's the pool available to pay for acquisition.
Drop your customer cohort data here. Each row is a monthly cohort (when a customer first purchased). Each column is the AVERAGE CUMULATIVE SPEND per customer in that cohort by month X. Most ecommerce platforms (Shopify, BigCommerce) export this directly. Window selector at top filters which rows feed the ceiling. Switch to "Matt's demo" in the cohort dataset dropdown to see what populated data looks like.
| Cohort | Customers | M0 | M1 | M2 | M3 | M4 | M5 | M6 | M7 | M8 | M9 | M10 | M11 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Avg Spend (window) | |||||||||||||
| Variable Margin contribution | |||||||||||||
| Desired profit | |||||||||||||
| Max CAC by month | |||||||||||||