Expansion Revenue Impact Simulator
Size the ARR you can unlock from upsells to existing customers.
This expansion adds $600,000 of ARR, the same growth would cost roughly $1,800,000in CAC to buy through new logos. Expanding existing, already-trusting customers is almost always the cheapest ARR you'll ever add.
Expansion revenue carries little to no acquisition cost and higher margins. Tie upsells to usage milestones so the offer lands when value is already proven.
About this calculator
Expansion revenue is the cheapest ARR you'll ever add, no new-logo CAC, no sales cycle to a stranger, just existing customers buying more of what they already trust. This simulator sizes the ARR an upsell offer generates from your current base, and, to make the comparison concrete, shows what it would have cost in CAC to generate the same ARR through new-logo acquisition instead.
How to use it
- Enter your existing customer count.
- Enter the upsell adoption rate, the share of customers who take the expansion offer.
- Enter the upsell ACV, the additional annual value per customer who expands.
- Enter new-logo CAC for comparison, and read the expansion ARR generated alongside the CAC you'd have spent to buy the same ARR through new customers.
Methodology
Customers who expand is existing customers times adoption rate. Expansion ARR is that number times upsell ACV, the new recurring revenue generated purely from the upsell.
To frame the comparison, the tool calculates "equivalent new logos", how many new customers at the same ACV would be needed to generate identical ARR, then multiplies that by new-logo CAC to show the "CAC avoided", the cash you would have spent acquiring that same ARR from strangers instead of from your existing base.
This comparison assumes new logos would come in at the same ACV as your upsell, in reality a new customer's starting ACV is often lower than an existing customer's expansion ACV, so the CAC-avoided figure is a reasonable but simplified benchmark, not an exact substitution.
The model doesn't account for the (typically modest) cost of running the expansion motion itself, customer success time, in-app prompts, account management, expansion revenue is cheap relative to new-logo CAC, not free.
FAQ
A raw ARR figure doesn't convey how much cheaper this revenue is to generate. Translating it into "this is what you'd have paid in CAC to get the same ARR from new customers" makes the cost advantage of expansion tangible and easy to defend in a budget conversation.
It varies enormously by motion, a well-timed, usage-triggered upsell can see 20-30%+ adoption, while a generic "upgrade now" email often sees single digits. Use your own historical adoption data if you have it; otherwise model a range rather than trusting one point estimate.
Usually a higher margin, since there's little to no incremental acquisition cost and the customer relationship, support, and onboarding infrastructure already exist. That's part of why expansion ARR is disproportionately valuable to NRR and overall gross margin, not just to top-line growth.
Expansion revenue is one half of the NRR equation, offsetting churn and contraction on the other side. This tool isolates the expansion side to size the opportunity; pair it with the Net Revenue Retention Forecaster to see the full net effect once churn is factored back in.