ROI Calculator

The ROI Calculator measures return on investment: how much you gained or lost relative to what you put in. Enter the amount invested, the amount you got back and any extra fees or costs, and it returns your net profit and ROI as a percentage. Add the holding period — in years or as start and end dates — and it also shows annualized ROI, so you can fairly compare an investment held for six months with one held for six years. A second mode handles marketing campaigns: enter revenue, cost of goods and campaign spend to get profit-based ROI, ROMI and ROAS side by side.

The basic formula is ROI = (Amount returned − Total cost) ÷ Total cost, where total cost includes the amount invested plus fees, commissions, taxes paid on purchase or any other extra cost. Worked example: you invest USD 10,000, pay USD 200 in fees and get back USD 13,500. Net profit is 13,500 − 10,200 = USD 3,300, and ROI = 3,300 ÷ 10,200 = 32.35%. Leaving the fees out would show 35% — a reminder that small costs matter. Held for 2.5 years, the annualized ROI is (1 + 0.3235)^(1 ÷ 2.5) − 1 ≈ 11.86% a year.

Annualized ROI matters because plain ROI ignores time. A 50% return over 5 years works out to about 8.45% a year, while a 30% return over 2 years is about 14.02% a year — the smaller headline number is actually the better investment. The annualized formula, (1 + ROI)^(1 ÷ years) − 1, is the same compounding logic used by the CAGR Calculator; for a single amount in and a single amount out, annualized ROI and CAGR are identical. For investments with several deposits or withdrawals, use an IRR or XIRR calculation instead.

In marketing mode, the calculator separates three numbers that are often confused. Take a campaign with USD 10,000 of ad spend that drives USD 50,000 of revenue on products whose cost of goods is 40% of the price. ROAS = revenue ÷ ad spend = 5.0x. ROMI on a revenue basis = (50,000 − 10,000) ÷ 10,000 = 400%. But true ROI counts only the gross profit: 50,000 × 60% = 30,000, minus the 10,000 spend leaves USD 20,000 net, so ROI = 200%. Break-even ROAS here is 1 ÷ 0.60 ≈ 1.67x. You can also add agency fees, creative or tool costs as other campaign costs to include them in ROI.

ROI vs ROAS vs CAGR: ROI tells you profit relative to total cost, with no time dimension. ROAS tells you revenue per unit of ad spend and ignores product costs, so it is best for day-to-day ad optimisation — see the ROAS Calculator. CAGR tells you the smoothed yearly growth rate of a value over time, ideal for comparing investments over different periods. Use ROI to decide whether something was worth doing, annualized ROI or CAGR to compare it with alternatives, and the Profit Margin Calculator to understand how much of each sale you keep.