Absolutely agree that customer level economics and business economics are not the same. Both are important.

At the end of the day, the key is to keep an eye on the cash — do you have more coming in than going out. After that, everything you look at has some kind of assumption built in that can bite you. Are you looking at marginal / fully costed economics? How are fixed costs allocated?

But to make sensible decisions you need to get to a lower level of data. You need to compare customer segments / products / marketing channels. Just remember the law of unintended consequences. You drop a channel and forget that it was taking most of the fixed costs. Oops. Wrong decision.

What is acceptable will likely change as the business / market develops. I once worked for a company where each subscriber added over £1000 to the market cap which totally distorted any ltv calculations. Growth was the only focus but only because the shareholders had lots of capital and were happy to continue investing. This would not apply in most circimstances.