Sneak Peek at CAC Payback Rates from Q1

So the Q1 State of SaaS Report will be live in a couple a weeks, we’re just waiting on the final batch of companies to release earnings and we’ll get stuck into producing that report. 

What I wanted to do was provide a quick sneak peak on how some of the data is shaping up in Q1 of this year vs Q1 last year.

The first metric I’ll cover today is CAC payback rates.

Now caveat here - as I write this we’re still waiting on Q1 numbers from about ⅓ of the companies we track. So these numbers could change slightly as more data comes in. But the trend for the 23 companies that have reported… isn’t great.

LTM CAC payback continues to trend up YoY. 

(note: these LTM numbers will vary from the Quarter CAC Payback numbers previously reported)

When we look at the median it hasn’t really moved. LTM CAC payback for the companies we track came in at 44 months in Q1 of last year

That’s basically flat at 45 months this year. But when we dig deeper we can start to see a shift. 

Average CAC payback is up big time from 33 months to 54 months. When we look at the breakdown in more detail we can see that 

8 out of the 23 companies have CAC Payback in excess of 50 months vs only 5 last year.

We had some big jumps on an individual company basis. 

• Palo Alto Networks jumped to 159 months from 40 months last year 

• Box jumped to 126 from 105

• SentinelOne jumped to 46 months from 30

• And Procore jumped to 50 from 34

Even the historically, super efficient Atlassian almost doubled to 18 months from 10 months.

The only companies that saw a decrease on CAC Payback were:

• Zoom (who are still really struggling at 168 months)

• PagerDuty 

• Appian 

• Palantir 

• Klaviyo 

Every other company has seen CAC payback increase YoY.

Not good.