Amazon Subscribe & Save LTV Calculator

Customer lifetime value is what a customer is worth to you over every order they place. Here it's counted in margin, not sales: what you keep after product cost and Amazon fees. A sales-based LTV makes every customer look more valuable than they are.

Amazon's Subscribe & Save program lets shoppers get repeat deliveries at a discount. You fund part of that discount, so each delivery earns a bit less. In return, subscribers keep buying without being sold to again. Whether that trade pays depends on two things: how big the discount is next to your margin, and how fast subscribers cancel.

margin per delivery   = price × (margin − discount)
churn per delivery    = 1 − (1 − monthly churn)^(months between deliveries)
deliveries            = 1 ÷ churn per delivery
subscriber LTV        = margin per delivery × deliveries
one-time buyer margin = price × margin

• Price: your full listing price for one delivery. Margin is what you keep at that price, as a %. The break-even ROAS calculator shows it.
• Discount: the Subscribe & Save discount you pay for. It comes straight out of your margin.
• Monthly churn: the share of subscribers who cancel each month. If 12% cancel each month, an average subscriber stays about 1 ÷ 0.12 ≈ 8 months.

The deliveries formula assumes the same share cancels each period. Real subscribers cancel faster at first and slower later, so treat the result as an estimate and update it with your own numbers.

A made-up supplement sells for $30.00 with a 40% margin. The brand funds a 10% Subscribe & Save discount, ships monthly, and 12% of subscribers cancel each month. These are the calculator's example values.

1. Margin per delivery = $30.00 × (40% − 10%) = $9.00.
2. Deliveries = 1 ÷ 12% = 8.3.
3. Subscriber LTV = $9.00 × 8.3 = $75.00.
4. A one-time buyer at full price brings in $30.00 × 40% = $12.00.

The subscriber is worth 6.25× a one-time buyer, even though each delivery earns less. If cancellations rose to 20% a month, LTV would fall to $45.00. Churn moves LTV much more than the discount does.

There's no standard number, because it depends on your margin and price. Judge it against your own figures:

• Above a one-time buyer's margin: the discount pays for itself. The bigger the gap, the more it's worth pushing Subscribe & Save in your listing and ads.
• Above what it costs to win a customer: a subscriber pays back their acquisition cost. Compare LTV with your CAC in the CAC payback calculator.
• Below a one-time buyer's margin: subscribers cancel too fast for the discount to pay off. Look at why they cancel before raising the discount.

• Counting LTV in sales, not margin. A $250 sales LTV sounds great until you take out product cost and fees.
• Forgetting the discount comes out of margin. A 10% discount on a 40% margin takes a quarter of your profit per delivery, not a tenth.
• Using early churn only. Churn in a subscriber's first month is often higher than later. Use an average over a longer period.
• Mixing monthly churn with longer delivery gaps. If deliveries are every two months, churn per delivery is higher than monthly churn. The calculator converts it for you.
• Giving ads credit for every subscriber. Some subscribers would have found you anyway. That matters when you use LTV to set ad budgets.

LTV tells you what a subscriber is worth. To set an ad budget, you also need to know how many subscribers your ads actually add. Ad reports count every subscriber who clicked, including people who would have subscribed anyway. A holdout test counts only the extra ones.

Once you know both, the max CAC calculator turns LTV into the most you can pay for a customer, and the sample conversion calculator checks whether free samples bring in enough subscribers to pay back.

Spillmark measures the sales your Meta ads cause on Amazon with holdout tests, so LTV-based budgets start from caused sales, not credited ones. See how lift is calculated.