Setup
Tell the tool about your business. Everything else is calculated from these five answers — you can change any of them later and watch the plan move.
Channel plan
Decide which channels do the work, and how much of the goal each one carries.
Live plan
The answer. Move one control and everything recalculates.
| Channel | CPL | True CAC | Customers | Budget | Share |
|---|
Take it further
An estimate is a starting point. Turning it into a plan you can defend takes your own data, a few decisions about sequencing, and someone who has done it before. That part is a conversation, not a product.
Three ways people work with me
Whichever fits. None of them require buying software.
A couple of hours on your plan with your real numbers. We work out what your actual cost per customer has been by channel, pace the year so it survives a cash-flow conversation, put a lean version against an aggressive one, and land on a one-page summary you can take into a budget meeting. You keep everything we produce.
Book a session →When the plan is the beginning rather than the deliverable — building the function, running the mix, owning the number. Brand and CX, growth and go-to-market, sponsorship and partnerships, AI and brand systems.
See how I work →The full model rebranded to your palette and logo, licensed for unlimited client use. Your team runs it in pitches and QBRs and it carries your name, not mine. The client relationship stays yours throughout.
Ask about white-label →Or just ask
If the number this tool gave you is uncomfortable, that is usually worth a conversation on its own.
Send me the plan name and what you were trying to work out. I will give you an honest read on the right next move — including when that isn't working with me.
Ask a question →Guide & glossary
Every number this tool produces, in plain language — what it means, how it is worked out, and what makes it move. Nothing here changes your plan; it is safe to read and click around.
The chain everything hangs off
Five numbers, each one feeding the next. Understand this and the rest of the tool follows.
What it costs in media to make one person raise their hand: fill in a form, book a demo, start a trial. Not a customer yet. A search ad might cost $120 per lead; a display ad on the same budget might cost $130 because far fewer people who see it act on it.
The share of those leads that become paying customers. A 5% close rate means one in twenty. This is mostly about how the business sells, not how the ad performed — sales cycle, pricing, follow-up speed.
What one actual customer costs. It is simply CPL ÷ close rate. At $120 per lead and a 5% close, every customer costs $2,400 — because you paid for twenty leads to get one. This is the number that matters, and it is always much larger than CPL.
The gross profit one customer produces over the whole time they stay. First-year value × years they last × gross margin. A $3,000-a-year customer who stays three years at 80% margin is worth $7,200 — not $9,000, because margin is what you keep.
Value divided by cost. 3:1 is the usual health mark — three dollars of lifetime profit for every dollar spent acquiring. Under 2:1 the plan is fragile. Above 10:1 usually means you are under-investing rather than winning, and could buy more customers before efficiency becomes the limit.
Why the same channel costs different amounts
If you change one setting and the numbers move a lot, this is usually why.
A launch pays more per customer than an established brand, and the tool applies that as a multiplier — roughly 1.6× at launch, falling to 0.75× once established.
Three reasons. Nobody is searching for your name yet, so every customer has to be bought rather than arriving on their own. The advertising platforms have no history to optimize against, so early spend is partly buying data. And with no reviews or reputation, more people bounce before converting.
It is not a penalty — it is the real price of being unknown, and it fades.
Someone typing "emergency plumber near me" is minutes from buying. Someone scrolling video ads was not thinking about you at all. Both can produce a lead; they close at very different rates.
Every channel carries an intent multiplier that adjusts your close rate. Search sits at 1.0 — full strength. Paid social around 0.45, so a 5% close rate becomes 2.25%. Broad video and connected TV sit lower still.
This is why a cheap lead is not automatically a cheap customer.
An e-commerce buyer decides in one session for $60. A manufacturing buyer takes nine months and a procurement process for $200,000. Both are normal.
Some industries here are direct response — e-commerce, retail, gaming, media — where a click converts straight away and there is no lead stage at all. In those, cost per lead and cost per customer are the same number.
Everywhere else has a lead stage, and the close rate does the work in between.
The case selector — launch, conservative, expected, established — scales every cost at once. It is there so you can show a room the same plan under different assumptions rather than arguing about a single figure.
Presenting expected alongside conservative is usually more persuasive than presenting expected alone.
Paid and organic are not the same kind of cost
The most common misreading of any marketing plan.
You buy attention. Spend stops, results stop, and the cost is visible in the media budget. Predictable, fast, and it scales with money.
SEO, content, social, email, referral. No media cost — but they are paid in hours: someone writes, posts, sends, answers. That cost is real and sits in salaries rather than the ad budget.
This is what the Organic Effort tab exists to show. It works backwards from the customers you assigned to each organic channel to the sends, posts and articles that implies, then checks that against what your team can actually produce. It is where "we'll just do SEO, it's free" gets tested.
What the warnings are telling you
The tool flags things rather than fixing them. Each one is a judgement call, not an error.
Glossary
Everything else you will see, alphabetically.