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What can you actually afford to pay for a SaaS lead?
(Most teams are optimizing to the wrong number.)
Enter your revenue per customer, your margin, your churn and your close rate. Find out the most you can pay for a lead before the customer stops being worth winning, and how far your current cost per lead is from that line.
Two paths: plan your numbers before you spend a dollar, or check whether what you're already spending is working.
A B2B SaaS team was buying demo requests at $180 and calling it cheap. Only 5% closed, so each customer cost $3,600 in media, plus $800 of SDR time and onboarding. Against $320 of monthly gross profit and 6% monthly churn, that customer took 14 months to pay for itself and returned $1.21 across its entire life. The dashboard said the channel was working.
Before you start
Run this per plan, not blended.
A $49 self-serve plan and a $40,000 enterprise contract have nothing in common economically. Blend them and the average describes a customer you never actually sell. Run the calculator for the segment you want more of, then repeat for the others.
If you are product-led, treat a trial signup as the lead and use trial to paid as your conversion rate. If you are sales-led, use the demo request.
Do you already have ads running?
Pick your path.
Your MRR per customer, or annual contract value divided by 12. Use the plan or segment you actually want more of.
Annual prepay puts a year of gross profit in the bank on day one, which changes what you can afford to spend to win the customer.
Revenue minus infrastructure, third party licences, and the support and success cost of serving that customer. Most B2B SaaS lands between 70 and 85.
Use logo churn for the customer count, not revenue churn. If you don't know it, take customers lost last month divided by customers at the start of the month. Enter whichever of the two you actually know and the other fills itself in.
Out of every 100 leads your ads produce, how many end up paying. Count every lead, including the ones sales never bothered to call. If you are product-led, this is trial signup to paid.
SDR and AE time, commission, implementation, and onboarding. In most B2B SaaS this is bigger than the media cost, and leaving it out is how a channel looks profitable on a dashboard and isn't.
How long you are willing to wait to get the acquisition cost back. Under 12 months is the usual bar for SMB SaaS. Enterprise deals with annual contracts can justify longer.
Your total paid media budget per month, across all channels you want judged here.
Total leads your ads produce in a month. Demo requests, trial signups, and contact forms combined. Count what actually reached the CRM, not what the platform reported.
Percent of ad clicks that turn into a lead. Leave it blank if you don't know it yet, everything else still works.
Principle
What your cost per lead actually tells you.
Payback is the constraint, not the cost per lead.
The same $200 lead is comfortable on an annual prepaid contract and fatal on month to month billing. Nothing about the ad changed. Everything about the cash did.
Google counts signups. It doesn't count revenue.
Without offline conversion data carrying real contract values, the algorithm optimizes toward whatever is easiest to generate, which is the least qualified lead in your funnel. It is doing exactly what you asked. You asked for the wrong thing.
Churn sets the ceiling on your ad budget.
At 6 percent monthly churn a customer lasts 17 months. At 2 percent it lasts 50. Same product, same price, and roughly three times the budget to go and win one.
(If your number came back red or amber.)
That's not bad luck. That's a structural problem.
Most owners leave the audit call knowing exactly which part of the funnel has been eating their margin. 30 minutes, live screen share, zero pitch.
FAQ
Questions we get about these numbers.
This calculator gives an estimate based on the numbers you enter. It isn't financial advice and doesn't guarantee results. Budget and pricing decisions are your own.