averagecac.com

Issue 01 / Q2 2026 · 30 of 34 public SaaS companies, live SEC data

Public SaaS CAC ranges from $10k to $14.6M.

That's a 1,505x spread across 30 companies, same SEC methodology, very different business models. Every CAC on this site carries a visible source: live numbers from SEC filings or a named primary report. Nothing invented, nothing hidden.

NET$10kTWLO$11kDOCU$12kTOST$19kKVYO$19kBILL$28kHUBS$34kMDB$88kCRWD$131kFRSH$141kPCTY$144kTEAM$185kASAN$218kDDOG$354kSPT$444kGTLB$551kPAYC$688kPCOR$762kPD$777kSNOW$884kIOT$963kWK$1.4MZS$1.7MS$2.1MTENB$2.4MBRZE$3.8MWDAY$5.2MVEEV$5.7MZI$7.7MNOW$14.6MNET$10kTWLO$11kDOCU$12kTOST$19kKVYO$19kBILL$28kHUBS$34kMDB$88kCRWD$131kFRSH$141kPCTY$144kTEAM$185kASAN$218kDDOG$354kSPT$444kGTLB$551kPAYC$688kPCOR$762kPD$777kSNOW$884kIOT$963kWK$1.4MZS$1.7MS$2.1MTENB$2.4MBRZE$3.8MWDAY$5.2MVEEV$5.7MZI$7.7MNOW$14.6M

The principle

Live

Pulled from SEC EDGAR or another machine-readable feed. Refreshed each Monday and after every new filing. Last-refreshed date shown on the page.

Sourced

Taken from a named benchmark report (First Page Sage, Optifai). Publication date and link shown on every benchmark cell.

Estimated

Where no primary source covers a cut, the cell stays an honest stub: it links to the nearest sourced cells and live public-company anchors instead of inventing a number.

The range, as published

CAC isn't one number. It's a distribution.

Across the live cohort, blended annual CAC ranges from $10k per customer to $14.6M, depending on what the company sells and to whom. Every page on this site shows the maths.

Lowest CACLive

$10k

Cloudflare, Inc.

per paying customers · net-new 94,752

Median CACLive

$551k

GITLAB INC.

per base customers · net-new 789

Highest CACLive

$14.6M

ServiceNow, Inc.

per total customers · net-new 300

The directory

34 public SaaS companies →

Every company in the cohort has a dedicated page with annual CAC, trailing-12-month CAC, the exact MD&A disclosure quote backing the customer count, the SEC filing URL, and the 4-year S&M trend. Pages refresh as new 10-Qs and 10-Ks land.

Common questions

What is ‘average CAC’ on this site?

What is the average CAC for a SaaS company?
Across the public SaaS companies in our cohort that disclose year-over-year customer counts, fully-loaded blended annual CAC ranges from around $10k per customer (high-volume, SMB-skewed platforms like Cloudflare's pay-as-you-go base) to well over $10M per customer (large-enterprise vendors that add few net-new logos a year, such as ServiceNow). The median sits around $500k. The answer for any specific company depends on its industry, ACV, and net-revenue retention.
What's a good CAC payback period?
It depends on deal size. Across the benchmarks we cite, B2B SaaS CAC payback runs roughly 8-12 months for SMB (under $25k ACV), 14-18 months for mid-market, and 18-24 months for enterprise (Optifai, n=939; overall median 15 months). First Page Sage's 28-industry table shows a similar spread, from about 9 months for SMB ecommerce up to 25-30 months for enterprise security and business services. Under 12 months is best-in-class; SMB SaaS should target it, while enterprise SaaS can tolerate 18+ given longer sales cycles.
Why does this site exist?
When an operator, investor, or analyst asks 'what's a normal CAC for a Series B fintech?' the available answers are either paywalled vendor reports or anecdotal blog posts. There's no public, transparent, source-cited reference for SaaS CAC the way Glassdoor exists for salaries. averagecac.com tries to be that reference: every number shows where it came from, with the disclosure quote or primary citation inline.
How is CAC computed on this site?
For the 34 public-company pages, CAC = S&M expense from the latest 10-K filing (XBRL tag us-gaap:SellingAndMarketingExpense) divided by net-new customers (extracted from MD&A narrative via a Claude-driven structured-extraction prompt that records the exact disclosure sentence verbatim). For industry benchmark cells, we only publish a number when a named primary source (First Page Sage, Optifai) publishes one; cells without a primary source render as honest stubs.
What's the difference between CAC, blended CAC, paid CAC, and new-logo CAC?
Paid CAC is paid-channel spend divided by attributed customers, useful for channel optimisation but not for cross-company comparison. Blended CAC is total marketing spend divided by total net-new: easy to compute, immune to attribution noise. Fully-loaded CAC adds sales team salaries, commissions, and S&M overhead. This is what 10-K filings disclose and what we publish. New-logo CAC strips out the portion of S&M allocated to existing-customer expansion. That's the most honest version but the split isn't publicly disclosed.

The benchmark grid

180 industry × stage × ACV benchmark cells →

Beyond the public-company directory, the site publishes a 180-cell grid: 12 industries × 5 stages × 3 ACV bands. 150cells carry a CAC-payback citation from First Page Sage's 28-industry table or Optifai's n=939 survey; the 30 cells no primary source covers render as honest stubs that link to adjacent cells and live public-company anchors. A CAC calculator, LTV:CAC and payback-period explainers, and a by-channel CAC breakdown round out the reference.