Most owners guess, and guess low. This calculator works out your true Customer Lifetime Value the way your business actually earns it, then tells you what you can afford to spend to get the next one.
Example: Home services company
Everything updates as you type. Start with the basics, then flip on Advanced mode when you're ready to add referrals and fine-tune the details.
Rough numbers are fine, you can sharpen them later. Advanced mode adds referrals, expansion revenue, and future-dollar discounting.
Simple divides your spend by customers won. Full funnel traces the path from ad click to closed customer, and unlocks what a lead and a click are worth to you.
Step 4: The Payoff
You know what a customer is worth. Plug in what you invest in growth each month, and see what that investment creates in lifetime value.
Lifetime value created over the next 12 months
From a $30,000 annual investment, that's — of lifetime value for every dollar you put in.
Show Your Work
No black box. Every formula this calculator uses, explained in plain English, because a number you don't trust is a number you won't act on.
Most LTV calculators multiply revenue and call it a day, which overstates your customer value and leads to overspending on acquisition. A customer who pays you $10,000 but costs $6,000 to serve is worth $4,000, not $10,000.
Customer Lifetime Value = Lifetime Revenue × Gross Margin %Every result on this page is margin-adjusted. That makes your LTV smaller than other calculators will tell you, and far more honest. When the margin-based number still dwarfs your acquisition cost, you can act on it with confidence.
For subscriptions, memberships, and retainers, lifetime value is your monthly revenue per customer times how long they stay:
LTV = Monthly Revenue × Margin % × Lifespan (months)Enter whichever you know: the calculator keeps lifespan and churn in sync, because they're two sides of the same coin: lifespan = 1 ÷ monthly churn rate. A 4% monthly churn means the average customer stays 25 months.
In Advanced mode we net expansion revenue (upsells and upgrades) against churn, and optionally apply a discount rate so revenue arriving years from now is valued in today's dollars, the way a CFO would.
The multiplier most owners miss is years retained. If you don't track it, derive it from annual retention: keeping 70% of customers each year means the average customer sticks around 1 ÷ (1 − 0.70) ≈ 3.3 years.
"One-time" is almost never truly one time. If some share of customers eventually comes back (a second project, another case, a new roof on the rental property), each customer is worth more than one sale. The math is a geometric series:
LTV = Avg Sale × Margin % × 1 ÷ (1 − Repeat Rate)A 20% repeat rate means each customer is worth 1.25 sales on average. A 40% repeat rate: 1.67 sales. Small loyalty improvements compound more than they look.
When your customers bring you customers, every acquired customer starts a chain. If each customer produces k new customers (referrals sent × the rate at which they buy), the chain sums to:
Referral Multiplier = 1 ÷ (1 − k) · LTV with referrals = LTV × Multiplier − Reward × (Multiplier − 1)Example: each customer refers 1 person and 25% of them buy, so k = 0.25 and the multiplier is 1.33, a 33% raise on every customer you acquire, for free. If you pay a referral reward, we subtract it per successful referral, and show you the number both ways.
This is also why paying for referrals is usually a bargain: a $100 gift card that turns k from 0.25 into 0.40 buys you a jump from a 1.33× to a 1.67× multiplier.
Customer Acquisition Cost at its simplest:
CAC = Total Monthly Marketing & Sales Spend ÷ New Customers per MonthThe full-funnel version traces every step, which tells you where the leaks are:
Clicks = Spend ÷ CPC → Leads = Clicks × Conversion % → Customers = Leads × Close %Once you know LTV, the funnel runs backwards too: a lead is worth LTV × close rate, and a click is worth lead value × conversion rate. That's your break-even bid, the CPC where you'd still make money. We also show a target CPC at a 3:1 ratio, which is where you want to live.
Payback period is how many months of gross profit it takes to recover CAC. Under 12 months is the common benchmark; under 6 is strong. For project businesses whose first sale covers CAC outright, payback is immediate: day one.
Your Full Report
Drop your email and we'll send you a clean one-page PDF report of your inputs, your LTV, and every benchmark on this page, ready to share with a partner, your bookkeeper, or whoever approves the marketing budget.
One email with your report attached. That's it: no drip campaign, no daily "just checking in."
Bruce & Eddy has been turning websites and marketing into customers since 2004. First conversation is free, and we'll tell you straight whether we can move your numbers.