Total monthly burn with categorized breakdown and cash runway.
Monthly costs
Cash & revenue
Current bank balance
Avg monthly net revenue
Results
Net burn—/mo
Gross burn
—
Runway (months)
—
Profitable?
—
Burn breakdown
Category
Monthly
% of burn
Annual
About this calculator
Burn rate is the heartbeat of an operating business. Get it wrong and you can run out of cash before you realize there was a problem. Yet most operators carry only a vague sense of monthly burn until they sit down to fundraise or close books.
This calculator breaks burn into 8 categories so you can see where money actually goes. The two biggest line items for most DTC brands are payroll (often 40-60% of burn) and performance marketing (often 25-40%). Software and fulfillment together usually run 10-20%. The rest — office, insurance, legal — is small but accumulates.
The most useful number this tool produces is net burn — gross outflow minus monthly revenue. Net burn is what determines runway. A $100K gross burn with $80K monthly revenue is a $20K net burn, giving 25 months runway on $500K cash. Same gross burn with no revenue is a 5-month runway. The difference matters enormously for decision-making.
Use category breakdown to find creep. If your software stack burn is 50% larger than 12 months ago while revenue grew 20%, you have a SaaS-sprawl problem. The Tech Stack Auditor tool can help inventory and consolidate. Pair this with the Cash Flow Runway tool for a deeper time-series projection of cash position.
Frequently asked questions
What's the difference between gross burn and net burn?
Gross burn = total monthly outflow (everything you spend). Net burn = gross burn minus monthly revenue inflow. Net burn is the truer measure of how fast you're consuming cash. A business with $50K gross burn and $30K monthly revenue has a $20K net burn — twice the runway of one with no revenue.
Should marketing spend be in burn?
Yes, but split it between performance marketing (variable, scales with revenue) and brand marketing (fixed). For runway calculations, treat performance marketing as variable (it generates revenue, partially self-funding) and brand marketing as fixed (pure burn).
How is burn different from operating expenses?
OpEx is an accounting category that includes some non-cash items (depreciation, amortization). Burn is purely cash outflow — what actually leaves your bank account. For runway planning, burn is the right number to watch. For P&L analysis, OpEx is the right framing.
What runway is "safe" to operate with?
Bootstrap-mode: 6-month runway is the lower bound, 12-month is healthy. Funded startups: 18-24 months target between rounds. Below 6 months, every decision should focus on either revenue acceleration or cost reduction. Below 3 months, you're in firefighting mode.
What categories should I track separately?
At minimum: payroll/contractors (usually largest), software/SaaS, marketing, fulfillment/3PL, office/insurance/legal. Tracking by category lets you spot creep — when software spend doubles year-over-year while revenue grows 30%, that's a problem you wouldn't see in aggregate burn.