Media Puppies
Break-even ROAS calculator
A 3x ROAS is meaningless without knowing your margin. This works out the ROAS that actually breaks you even — and the one you need to make money.
Set from your location. The maths is the same in any currency — only the labels change.
What the product actually costs you.
Typically 2–3% in India.
Prepaid orders are far lower than COD.
What you want left after ads.
Runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to us or stored anywhere.
Why the headline ROAS lies
“We're doing 3x” means nothing on its own. A brand with a 60% contribution margin is profitable at 1.7x. A brand at 22% is still losing money at 4x. The same number is a triumph for one and a slow death for the other.
What this calculator accounts for
- Cost of goods — what the product actually costs you landed.
- Shipping and packing on every delivered order.
- Payment and platform fees, typically 2–3% in India.
- Returns and RTO — the big one. A returned order earns nothing and costs shipping in both directions, so it is charged at twice the shipping cost here.
The RTO problem
Cash on delivery makes RTO the single largest hidden cost for Indian D2C. A brand running 30% RTO on COD and 4% on prepaid has two completely different businesses inside one dashboard. Work out this calculation separately for each payment method before you decide the ads are failing.
Blended, not platform-reported
Ad platforms count conversions they believe they influenced, so the numbers in Meta and Google together usually exceed your actual revenue. Judge the business on blended ROAS — total revenue divided by total ad spend — and use platform ROAS only to compare campaigns against each other.
Questions
What is contribution margin?+
What is left from an order after every variable cost of fulfilling it, but before fixed costs and advertising. It is the money available to pay for ads and overheads.
Should I include GST?+
Work in the figures you actually keep. If your price includes GST that you remit, use the ex-GST amount as order value.
Why is my target margin unreachable?+
Because the margin you want is larger than the margin the product leaves you. The fix is pricing, product cost or RTO — not the ad account.
Does this work for services?+
Roughly. Set cost of goods to your delivery cost, shipping and RTO to zero, and the break-even figure is still correct.
Embed this calculator
Free to use on your own site. Copy this into your page — the attribution line is the only condition.
The paragraph below the iframe is the part that matters: an iframe's contents are served from our domain, so a link inside it is not a link from your page. The paragraph is. The small script just resizes the frame to fit your column — drop it if you prefer, the fixed height still works.
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