Break-even ROAS calculator.
Below this ROAS, every order loses money. We take your AOV, unit costs, fees, and return rate, then return the contribution margin left for ads, the minimum ROAS to break even, your break-even CPA, and how profit scales as ROAS climbs above it.
Want it in your inbox? Drop your email and we'll send this readout plus the operator's playbook: how to read break-even ROAS against your blended MER, and the levers that move it (margin, shipping, fees, returns).
What break-even ROAS actually is
ROAS is revenue divided by ad spend. Break-even ROAS is the point where the gross profit on an order exactly equals what you paid to acquire it — one cent below and you're funding sales out of pocket. It's just 1 ÷ your contribution margin ratio. A 40% contribution margin means a 2.5x break-even ROAS. A 25% margin means 4.0x. The thinner your margin, the higher the bar your ads have to clear.
This is the number to set targets and kill ad sets against. It does not include fixed overhead (rent, salaries, software) — it's a per-order contribution figure, so a campaign at exactly break-even ROAS pays for its own customer acquisition but contributes nothing to the rest of the business. Most operators target comfortably above it. We don't publish a "good ROAS" benchmark here because the only one that matters is yours, and it falls straight out of your own unit economics above.
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