B
Evidence Grade B
Graded
accuracy verified by the review judge
Safe to Cite
Current
40%
40% -- cac growth rate for B2B SaaS startups (2026)
Startup Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) increased by 40% to 60% between 2023 and 2026.
- Reported as a range of 40% to 60% increase
Attribution:
View source
Lighthouse Research Team
Last verified:
·
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Source verified
Evidence graded
Value
40%
Unit
Percentage
Data Vintage
2026
Entity
Evidence Quality
B
Strong, reliable evidence
Sourced from a well-regarded research firm or industry leader with transparent methodology and a reasonably large sample.
Single source - not yet corroborated
Score breakdown
Extraction
75
Source Trust
60
Citation Chain
20
Independence
30
Methodology
45
Freshness
95
Source
Foundry CRO
Primary
Tier B
https://foundrycro.com/blog/startup-marketing-benchmarks-by-funding-stage-2026/ ↗
Source Article
Startup Marketing Benchmarks by Stage 2026 + Free Stage Check | Foundry CRO
The short version:
- A Series A startup should spend $500K to $2M annually on marketing (15 to 25% of ARR), with monthly ad spend of $15K to $50K. A Seed startup should spend $36K to $120K annually (20 to 40% of ARR). Marketing budget as a percentage of ARR should decrease as you scale, not increase…
Original Research
Foundry CRO
· Original study ↗
Methodology
Range 40-60%, midpoint used
Methodology documented
Segmentation
IndustrySaaS
Company SizeSMB
RoleAll marketers
Channelcontent
Cite this stat
Plain Text
B2B SaaS startups: 40% cac growth rate. Source: Foundry CRO (2026). Via Lighthouse Intelligence -- https://lighthousedata.io/data/cac-increase-since-2023
HTML Embed
<blockquote cite="https://lighthousedata.io/data/cac-increase-since-2023" style="border-left:3px solid #2563eb;padding:12px 16px;margin:16px 0;font-family:system-ui,sans-serif;background:#f0f4ff;"><strong>40%</strong> -- cac growth rate for B2B SaaS startups<br><small>Source: Foundry CRO (2026) · <a href="https://lighthousedata.io/data/cac-increase-since-2023" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Lighthouse Intelligence</a></small></blockquote>
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