The break-even calculator tells you the ROAS you need. This tells you something different: given the CPA you’re actually paying right now, are you profitable on the first order, and by how much.
Zero-rated goods, or selling somewhere with no VAT or sales tax to account for? Set the rate to 0.
What a single order contributes before ad spend.
Not a target: pull this from Ads Manager, blended across the account.
This isn't a promise about repeat purchases: you're already in the black before any of that.
The spreadsheet version, plus how this differs from break-even ROAS and when each one matters.
Working out what CPA you need instead? the ROAS you actually need to see
Selling alcohol? Calculate UK Alcohol Duty to fill in the duty field above properly.
Actual CPA moves week to week. A profitable first order at last month's CPA can flip underwater this month without anything else changing. That's why this is a check, not a one-off calculation.
Ads Manager's cost-per-purchase, blended across the account over at least a week, is the number that belongs in this calculator, not the CPA you were hoping for when you set the budget.
Supplier price rises, carrier increases and fee changes all move contribution quietly. Bookmark this page. It takes a minute to re-run once something changes.
First-order profit is what’s left of a single order once every variable cost of fulfilling it (cost of goods, duty, shipping, pick and pack, payment fees, VAT) is taken out, and what you actually paid to acquire that customer is subtracted on top. It’s the plainest possible answer to “did that sale make money.”
Break-even ROAS answers a different question: what ROAS would you need to see for this to work. This tool skips the ROAS entirely and asks about cash: given what you actually paid Meta to get that order, are you ahead or behind.
Contribution is order value minus VAT, cost of goods, duty, outbound shipping, pick and pack, and payment fees. Actual CPA is what Ads Manager reports you paid per purchase, not a target or an estimate.
ROAS is a ratio, and ratios hide things. A 3× ROAS on a £20 order and a 3× ROAS on a £120 order can leave very different amounts of actual money in the business once fulfilment costs are accounted for. Profit in pounds and pence doesn’t hide anything: it either covers the cost of acquiring the customer or it doesn’t.
That’s also why this tool asks for actual CPA rather than reported ROAS. CPA is a cash figure you can check against your ad account bill. ROAS depends on what the platform decides to attribute, which is exactly the thing the break-even ROAS calculator’s attribution multiplier exists to correct for.
A first-order loss isn’t automatically a crisis: plenty of D2C brands plan for it and recover the difference on a second or third order. It becomes a problem in three situations:
Everything that moves contribution moves first-order profit: price, discount policy, shipping cost, supplier pricing. And so does the one thing this tool isolates on its own: actual CPA. A creative that lowers CPA by even a few percent often does more for first-order profit than a full point of extra margin, because CPA sits directly in the subtraction rather than being diluted across every cost line.
If contribution itself needs work first, the contribution margin calculator breaks that figure down on its own, and the break-even ROAS calculator turns it into the ROAS floor to plan campaigns against.
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Break-even ROAS asks what you need: the reported ROAS that has to show up in Ads Manager before you lose money. This asks what you're getting: given the CPA you're actually paying right now, is the first order profitable, and by how much.
Use break-even ROAS to set a floor before you spend. Use this to check reality against it once campaigns are live.
Because actual CPA already is the real number: it comes from what you actually paid, divided by purchases the platform reported. If you suspect the platform is over-counting purchases, use your true incremental CPA instead of the blended Ads Manager figure, and the result here will reflect it automatically.
Not necessarily: plenty of healthy D2C businesses run a small loss on order one and recover it on repeat purchase. It becomes a problem when nobody is tracking repeat rate, or when the loss is large enough that repeat purchases would need to arrive faster or more often than they realistically do.
If you're relying on repeat orders to break even, the 90-day view on the break-even ROAS calculator is the one to check next.
Ads Manager, cost per purchase, blended across the account, ideally over at least seven days so a single volatile day doesn't skew it. If you run multiple products with very different economics, calculate this per product line rather than using one blended figure for everything.
Wherever it already lives in your accounts: just don't enter it twice. If your supplier invoice bundles duty into the unit cost, leave the duty field at zero. If you pay it separately, or you're not sure, the UK Alcohol Duty Calculator works it out and can hand the figure straight to this one.
Yes. If the average order value you enter includes VAT, tick the box and set your rate: the calculator removes the VAT portion before working out contribution, because that money is owed to HMRC and was never really margin. Set the rate to 0 for zero-rated goods or a market with no VAT or sales tax.
Deliberately left out. This tool answers one question cleanly (is the first order itself profitable) without folding in an LTV assumption that's usually shakier than the first-order numbers. For the value a customer brings over time, use the LTV calculator alongside this one.
No. Everything runs in your browser and disappears when you close the tab. The only thing that leaves is an email address, and only if you choose to type one in.
One calculator rarely tells the whole story. This is the order that actually works: from margin, to target, to a page that can convert the traffic you send it.