What is CAC?
CAC is the cost of acquiring a customer. Add up what you spent to win clients over a period, including ads, tools and your own time, and divide it by the number of clients you won
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Why it costs more to win
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The video
The short answer
Why winning a client costs more now
When anyone can offer the same thing, every client costs more to win. AI turned building a website into something anyone with a $20 a month subscription can do, so the same business now hears the same pitch from many people at once. The bigger deals moved to infrastructure: software a business runs its day on, wired into its real operations, where knowing what has to work still matters.
Why would easier tools make clients more expensive to win?
Because the client now has more people offering the same thing. You spend more time and money standing out, and more of your pitches end without a sale, so each client you do win costs more
Should I stop building websites?
No. A website is still a good first job, but it is hard to charge much for it on its own. Use it to get in the door, then look for the system the business actually runs on
What counts as infrastructure?
Software a business uses every day to run, not just to look good. Think intake, scheduling, referrals, follow-ups and reporting, connected to the data the team already has
CAC in plain English
What changed, and where the work went
CAC in plain words
CAC is the cost of acquiring a customer: what you spent to win clients, divided by how many you won. When more people sell the same thing, that number goes up
In 2015, the learning curve was the moat
Selling a website meant months of learning design, code, deployment and debugging. In Stack Overflow's 2015 survey, 41.8% of developers called themselves self-taught and 37.7% had a computer science degree. A coding bootcamp averaged 10.8 weeks and $11,063 in tuition
Now, everyone pitches the same offer
Claude and ChatGPT each cost $20 a month on their monthly plans, and either one can build a clean site and deploy it in minutes. When ten people pitch the same business the same website, each pitch is worth less and each win costs more
The bigger deals moved to infrastructure
Infrastructure is the software a business runs its day on, wired into its real operations, like a referral system that shows a clinic which doctors send patients. AI can write that code. Knowing what has to work, and making sure it does, is the part people pay for
In the guide
What the guide gives you
Your CAC in one minute
A worksheet with a worked example
The crowded-offer test
Five questions that show whether your offer has become a commodity
Where manual decisions hide
A checklist for clinics, dental offices, home services, law firms and agencies
The owner interview
Ten questions that find the decision someone keeps making by hand
From one decision to a system
Data sources, cleanup, the dashboard and the alert, walked through an anonymized referral example
Proving it works
What to measure in the first 30 days
Copy-paste prompts
A prompt for Claude or ChatGPT for each step
Free, no call
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Fine print
What this page is, and isn't
- The ten pitches and the website offer in the video are an illustration, not a measured market rate.
- The Course Report figures were its projections for 2015. The MIT figure counts pilots in that study's sample that showed no measurable effect on revenue.
- The clinic example is anonymized. The names in the guide's examples are made up.
- Collins names vibe coding its 2025 word of the year (CNN, 6 November 2025)
- Course Report, 2015 coding bootcamp market size study
- Stack Overflow developer survey 2015 (InfoWorld coverage)
- Claude pricing
- ChatGPT pricing
- Fortune, MIT report: 95% of generative AI pilots at companies are failing (18 August 2025)
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