Unit economics
Unit economics in the Business area (Marketing ROI) — route /business/unit-economics.
Unit economics lives in the Business area of the dashboard, under Marketing ROI.
At a glance#
| Dashboard route | /business/unit-economics |
| Area | Business (business) |
| Group | Marketing ROI |
| Platforms | Available for every app platform. |
What it does#
Unit economics is the single "is growth profitable?" view. It composes three existing reads into one page — the LTV, CAC and ARPU figures, MRR and ARR, and gross revenue, net revenue, refunds and ad spend — and derives two numbers from them:
| Derived metric | How |
|---|---|
| Contribution margin | Net revenue − ad spend. |
| CAC payback | CAC ÷ monthly ARPU — approximately how many months to recover acquisition cost. |
Where an input is approximated rather than measured, the page labels it. Read those labels.
When to use it#
Before any decision about spending more. It is the one page that puts revenue and cost on the same screen, which is the only way to see that a growing business is growing unprofitably.
CAC payback is the number most teams under-weight. A healthy LTV/CAC ratio with a fourteen-month payback means you finance every customer for over a year — which is a funding requirement, not a growth strategy.
Workflow#
Read the labels before the numbers
Approximated inputs are marked. A contribution margin built on an approximated MRR inherits that approximation.
Contribution margin first
Net revenue minus ad spend is the closest thing here to "did this month make money". If it is negative, nothing else on the page matters yet.
Then payback
It converts the ratio into a cash-flow question. Shorter is better in a way the ratio does not express.
Then per-channel, on the source pages
This page is the summary. LTV & CAC and Cost & ROAS have the breakdowns.
Permissions and prerequisites#
Requires revenue events, ad-spend data, and — for real rather than approximated MRR — subscription lifecycle events.
Limits and edge cases#
CAC payback uses monthly ARPU as a proxy, which is an approximation and is labelled as one.
Every input inherits its own caveats — approximated MRR, attribution-dependent CAC, client-reported revenue. Composing them compounds those rather than cancelling them.
No new measurement happens here. A number that disagrees with its source page is a time-window difference.
Troubleshooting#
Contribution margin is negative and revenue is growing. That is the finding the page exists for: you are buying growth. Look at per-channel ROAS to see where.
Payback is missing. CAC or ARPU is unavailable — usually no spend data.
A number differs from its source page. Match the time ranges.
Where the data comes from#
Served by
Business impact