Two things have to be true before a growth number means anything. The figure has to be benchmarked against something real, and it has to come out of a pipeline that marketing and engineering both trust. The 2026 Aleph and Benchmarkit study, built on full-year 2025 actuals from 342 SaaS and AI-native companies, puts median B2B SaaS CAC payback at 16 months, the top quartile at six or fewer and the bottom quartile at 24 or more, with median gross revenue retention at 84 per cent, down four points, and median ARR per employee at US$193,000.
The pipeline half consolidated over the same period. Fivetran absorbed Census, Databricks announced CustomerLake in June 2026, and Hightouch repositioned as an agentic CDP, all pushing activation back into the warehouse. The CDP Institute found composable, warehouse-native vendors growing headcount 7.8 per cent organically against a 1.3 per cent industry average. Consent moved with it: from 15 June 2026 the Google Signals setting in GA4 no longer governs Google Ads collection, and the Consent Mode ad_storage parameter alone does.
