SaaS Customer Acquisition Costs

The cluster focuses on debates about customer acquisition costs (CAC) in SaaS and subscription businesses, comparing them to customer lifetime value (LTV), retention rates, and overall profitability.

📉 Falling 0.3x Startups & Business
2,200
Comments
20
Years Active
5
Top Authors
#7894
Topic ID

Activity Over Time

2007
3
2008
28
2009
48
2010
100
2011
145
2012
144
2013
146
2014
154
2015
125
2016
146
2017
150
2018
93
2019
132
2020
161
2021
126
2022
123
2023
186
2024
98
2025
80
2026
12

Keywords

FY23 AI DISH LTV FreshBooks NPV MBA AAR RLV ARR acquisition customer retention revenue cost costs customers sales saas churn

Sample Comments

disiplus Mar 2, 2017 View on HN

thats the price of acquiring a customer. for my saas the cost to acquire a customer is X, X is multiple of montly fees. so only after couple of months im going to be on 0. The cost for me could be adwords, running a free plan, or something else.how is this different. I assume that they hope to convert some of those to regular customers.

discardorama Oct 4, 2015 View on HN

There's something wrong when "customer acquisition" is your biggest expense....

sharemywin Dec 31, 2015 View on HN

Customer acquisition is expensive.

citizens May 28, 2012 View on HN

The real cost of acquisition would be much higher. Newsletter Subscriber != Customer

snovv_crash Apr 1, 2019 View on HN

Because it doesn't take inyo account CAC, which might be higher than the profits made per customer.

incomethax May 12, 2011 View on HN

If only user acquisition costs were that low...

wmf Nov 14, 2023 View on HN

Am I the only one who thinks 36% customer acquisition cost is not crazy?

jklein11 Apr 30, 2015 View on HN

How can you afford a high touch sign up process for a customer who is worth ~$144 a year?

booger1 Nov 11, 2014 View on HN

Looks like they have a run rate of over $100M (25M in subscription revenue last quarter) -- seems like they spent $100M to get to $100M+ in run rate - typical saas model in early days

PhilipA Mar 31, 2021 View on HN

That is pretty normal on high scaling SaaS solutions. If you earn 100k a year on a solution, and you know they in average stay for 5 years, you might spend 150k to acquire them as it is still a good business.