Calculate gross burn, net burn, runway in months, and your zero-cash date. Know exactly how long your money lasts.
Used by bootstrapped founders to understand and extend their runway
Current savings or cash balance available to spend
Hosting, tools, salary, subscriptions — all hard costs
MRR or recurring revenue offsetting your expenses
$15,000 cash ÷ $2,000/mo net burn
$2,000/mo
Total monthly expenses before any revenue offset
$2,000/mo
How fast your cash balance is shrinking each month
Oct 2026
Estimated date your cash balance hits zero
Reducing monthly expenses from $2,000/mo to $1,600/mo would change your runway from 7.5 months to 9.4 months. That's 1.9 extra months of runway from cutting $400/mo in costs.
High burn rate with low revenue means you need customers fast. The Distribution Framework helps you find and close customers with proven outreach that went from 2% to 27% reply rate. Every week you wait costs you runway.
Get the Distribution FrameworkOne-time purchase. Starts at $39.
| Stage | Monthly Burn | Typical Runway | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo Bootstrapper(your range) | $500–$2,000 | 12–24+ months | Side project or full-time with savings. Mostly opportunity cost. |
| Bootstrapped (Revenue) | $2,000–$5,000 | 6–18 months | Some revenue offsetting costs. Net burn < gross burn. |
| Pre-Seed | $5,000–$15,000 | 12–18 months | Small team, lean operations. |
| Seed | $15,000–$50,000 | 12–18 months | Growing team, product-market fit search. |
| Series A | $50,000–$200,000 | 18–24 months | Scaling team and go-to-market. |
| Series B+ | $200,000–$1,000,000+ | 18–24 months | Rapid scaling, multiple departments. |
This calculator tells you how long your money lasts. The Distribution Framework tells you how to make money before it runs out — proven outreach system with AI-powered lead sourcing, ICP evaluation, and personalized cold email.
Get the Distribution FrameworkOne-time purchase. Starts at $39.
Churn Rate Calculator
Analyze churn rate, revenue impact, and industry benchmarks.
CAC Calculator
Compute acquisition cost, LTV:CAC ratio, and payback period.
Revenue Growth Calculator
Project MRR and ARR growth with churn scenarios.
Client Qualification Tool
Score customer segments with a weighted ICP framework.
LTV Calculator
Calculate customer lifetime value with expansion revenue and churn scenarios.
Break-Even Calculator
Calculate your break-even point in units, revenue, and time.
Burn rate is how much cash your startup spends each month. It's the single number that determines how long you can survive without new revenue or investment.
There are two types you need to know:
Gross burn rate is your total monthly spending — every dollar going out the door. Hosting, tools, subscriptions, salaries, contractor fees. If you're spending $2,000/month on infrastructure and tools, your gross burn is $2,000 regardless of what you're bringing in.
Net burn rate is gross burn minus monthly revenue. If you're spending $2,000 but bringing in $800, your net burn is $1,200. This is the number that actually determines your runway — it's how fast your cash balance is shrinking.
For bootstrapped founders, there's a third number most calculators ignore: opportunity cost. If you're working 10 hours a week on your product instead of consulting at $75/hr, you're implicitly burning $3,000/month in foregone income. That's real money, even if it never leaves your bank account.
Why does burn rate matter? Because it sets the clock. High burn means you have less time to find product-market fit, close customers, or raise money. Low burn buys you options. Every bootstrapped founder who's made it through a rough patch did it by ruthlessly controlling burn while growing revenue.
Check your break-even calculator to see how many customers you need before your revenue covers your expenses completely.
The math is straightforward. Here's how to do it for a real bootstrapped scenario.
Example: You're a solo founder working on your SaaS product part-time. Here's your monthly picture:
Gross burn rate = total monthly expenses $150 + $200 + $100 + $50 + $300 = $800/month
Net burn rate = gross burn − monthly revenue $800 − $800 = $0/month (you're at break-even)
Runway = cash on hand ÷ net burn rate $15,000 ÷ $0 = infinite (you're sustainable)
Now let's say revenue drops to $0 (a big customer churns): Net burn = $800 − $0 = $800/month Runway = $15,000 ÷ $800 = 18.75 months
Including opportunity cost: If you're working 10 hours/week at an implied $50/hr rate: Opportunity cost = $50 × 10 × 4.33 = $2,165/month Adjusted gross burn = $800 + $2,165 = $2,965/month Adjusted net burn = $2,965 − $0 = $2,965/month Adjusted runway = $15,000 ÷ $2,965 = 5.1 months
That number is sobering. It's why tracking opportunity cost matters — especially when deciding whether to keep pushing or take a break and consult.
Use our CAC calculator alongside this to understand how much you can spend to acquire each customer.
Burn rate and runway are two sides of the same coin. Burn rate is the speed, runway is the distance.
Runway = cash on hand ÷ monthly net burn
If you have $15,000 in savings and a $1,200 net burn rate, your runway is 12.5 months. That's how long you have to reach sustainability before you run out of money.
The relationship between them is not linear — small changes in burn rate create big changes in runway:
Cutting burn in half doesn't double your runway — it can quadruple it. That's why experienced founders watch burn obsessively.
How to extend runway without raising money:
Revenue growth is the other lever. Every dollar of new revenue directly reduces net burn. At $800/month expenses and $400/month revenue, you have a $400 net burn. One new customer at $200/month cuts your burn by 50%.
There's no universal answer — it entirely depends on your stage, revenue, and savings buffer.
For bootstrapped solopreneurs: A good burn rate is whatever keeps your runway above 12 months while you experiment. Most bootstrapped founders starting out should target under $1,000/month in hard costs. At that level, $12,000 in savings gives you a full year to find traction.
For bootstrapped founders with revenue: Once you're generating $500-1,000/month, your net burn becomes the important number. Net burn under $500/month is healthy. Positive net burn (revenue > expenses) means you're sustainable — you can keep going indefinitely.
For VC-backed startups: Conventional wisdom is 18-24 months of runway at all times. A seed-stage startup spending $30,000/month needs $540,000-720,000 in the bank before raising their next round.
The real question isn't "is my burn rate good?" but "is my burn rate justified by the progress I'm making?"
If you're burning $2,000/month and adding one paying customer every month at $200/month, you'll be cash-flow positive in about 10 months. That's defensible. If you're burning $2,000/month and adding no customers, you're spending runway with nothing to show for it.
A burn rate that gets you to product-market fit is a good burn rate. A burn rate that runs out the clock before you get traction is a bad one, regardless of the dollar amount.
For revenue-funded businesses, watch the churn rate calculator too — high churn can turn a decreasing net burn into an increasing one as revenue stops growing.
When runway is tight, cutting burn is often faster than growing revenue. Here are five levers that actually work for bootstrapped founders:
1. Audit and cut subscriptions ruthlessly Most founders are paying for tools they use less than once a week. Do a full audit: list every recurring charge, what you used it for last month, and whether you could replace it with something free or cheaper. Tools like Figma, Notion, Linear, Loom, Slack — all have free tiers. Cutting $400/month in subscriptions adds 37 months to a $15,000 runway at $1,200/month burn.
2. Switch infrastructure to serverless/edge Traditional VPS hosting for a side project can cost $50-200/month. Cloudflare Workers + D1 + R2 runs a full production app for under $10/month. Vercel, Railway, and Render have decent free tiers. If you're not doing this already, it's the fastest way to cut $100-500/month immediately.
3. Replace paid ads with outreach Paid acquisition burns cash fast with uncertain returns. Outreach — cold email, LinkedIn DMs, Reddit posts, building-in-public content — costs time instead of money. At a $50/hour opportunity cost rate, 5 hours of outreach costs $250 in time but $0 in cash. That's a meaningful burn rate improvement if you're spending $300-500/month on ads.
4. Move annual vs monthly on everything you keep If you've decided a tool is worth keeping, paying annually almost always saves 20-40%. Paying $99/year instead of $12/month saves $45/year per tool. Do this for 5 tools and you've saved $225/year — not huge, but it compounds.
5. Grow revenue faster than expenses This is the only lever that doesn't just slow the clock — it eventually stops it. Every new customer reduces net burn directly. Use the break-even calculator to find exactly how many customers you need before revenue covers all your expenses. Then reverse-engineer how to close that many customers in your remaining runway using proven outreach (see below).
The fastest path to zero burn is a combination: cut everything non-essential, go serverless, and close customers aggressively. That's how solo bootstrapped founders survive — not through fundraising, but through ruthless financial discipline and relentless customer acquisition.