Startup runway calculator
Free. No signup. Know your runway in 30 seconds.
Enter your cash, burn, and revenue. See how many months you've got and the exact month you'd run out. No email required.
Looking for gross vs net burn? Use the burn rate calculator →
Your numbers
What's in the bank today.
Salaries, infra, subscriptions, everything going out.
Current recurring revenue. Leave at 0 if pre-revenue.
Month-over-month growth as a percentage. Conservative = 2-5%.
Expected monthly cost increase. 0 if expenses are flat.
At current burn and growth rate.
Runs out in about 11.7 months.
Your burn grows by 2% a month. Your revenue grows by 5% a month. At that pace, you never hit default-alive in the next 24 months.
Your cash over the next 24 months
Based on your inputs. Update them and the chart updates live.
What this calculator does and doesn't do
This calculator gives you a back-of-envelope runway estimate. It's a starting point, not a financial model. It assumes:
- Linear growth at the rate you entered (real growth is rarely linear)
- No one-time expenses or income (fundraising rounds, big invoices, seasonal costs)
- No currency or tax effects
- Revenue starts collecting immediately (no payment delays)
If you want a forecast that models scenarios, handles one-time items, and feeds a repeatable monthly investor update, that's what Vectig does.
Prefer to do this in Claude or ChatGPT? I also wrote a prompt that builds a three-scenario model you can paste anywhere.
Related questions
What is a startup runway?
Runway is how many months your startup can operate before running out of cash, assuming current burn and revenue. If you have $500K and burn $50K/month with no revenue, you have 10 months of runway.
How is runway calculated?
Runway = cash ÷ (monthly burn − monthly revenue). If revenue is growing, runway extends over time; if expenses are growing faster, it shortens. This calculator models both.
What's a healthy runway for a startup?
Most investors want to see 12–18 months minimum. Below 6 months, you should either be raising, cutting burn, or getting profitable. Below 3 months is a crisis.
What's “default alive”?
Term coined by Paul Graham. A startup is default-alive if current revenue covers current burn within a reasonable time frame — meaning you don't strictly need to raise. This calculator estimates when (or if) you hit that point.
Is this calculator accurate enough to use for investor meetings?
For a rough back-of-envelope number, yes. For actual investor updates or board meetings, you want a model that accounts for one-time expenses, scenario modeling, and a repeatable monthly process — which is what Vectig does.