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How to calculate runway for a bootstrapped SaaS (and what to do with the number)

Calculate bootstrapped runway as cash divided by net burn, where net burn is total monthly costs — including the salary you are not paying yourself — minus monthly recurring revenue. The number that matters is not months of survival but the decision date: the day you must have hit a revenue threshold or change something. Bootstrapped founders routinely overstate runway by excluding their own living costs, which turns an eight-month runway into a fourteen-month fantasy and delays every hard call by half a year.

1 hour $0 to run6 stepsUpdated 2026

The workflow

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  1. Infrastructure, tools, contractors, accounting, and your own living expenses. Founders exclude their salary because they are not taking one, but the savings you burn while working unpaid are exactly as gone as money spent on servers. A bootstrapped SaaS with $400 of infrastructure and a founder living on $3,500 a month has $3,900 of burn, not $400, and every plan built on the smaller number is wrong.

  2. MRR is what repeats. Consulting income, a one-time annual prepayment, or a friend's advance is cash — it extends the runway but does not reduce the burn. Track them as two lines, because a founder who counts a $6,000 consulting month as revenue will believe the business turned a corner it never approached.

  3. Net burn is costs minus MRR. Cash divided by net burn is your months. Then write down the actual calendar date, because "nine months of runway" is abstract and "17 June" is not. That date is the deliverable of this whole exercise; every plan you make should be measured against it rather than against a vague sense of time remaining.

    Runway CalculatorFull tool
    Input
    Cash $28,000. Costs $650 infrastructure + $3,400 living. MRR $1,150.
    What comes back
    Net burn $2,900/mo → 9.6 months, decision date around mid-June. At the current growth of ~$180 MRR/month you reach break-even in month 16 — six months past the cash. The gap is the real finding: growth has to roughly double, or costs drop, or you take contract work now rather than in month eight.

    Run it yourself — free, no signup:

    8%
    Runway
    5+ years
    Cash never reaches zero inside five years: you break even at month 12 and it climbs from there. That holds exactly as long as the growth rate does.
    Break-even month
    Month 12
    The month the borrowing stops. Worth more attention than the runway number.
    What cash ÷ burn would tell you
    12 months
    It says 12 months, because it assumes your MRR never moves. That assumption is the entire difference between running out next year and not running out.

    Under six months: cut, because you need a certain effect fast. Above twelve: grow, because growth compounds and cutting caps your ceiling. The founders who get this wrong grow when they should cut — growing feels like progress.

  4. Take your MRR growth over the last three months and project it flat to the decision date. If projected MRR at that date is below your costs, you already know today that the current trajectory does not close the gap — and you have months to act rather than weeks. This single comparison is what turns runway from a status number into a decision tool.

  5. There are only three: raise revenue, cut costs, or add outside income. Write which lever you pull at 6 months, at 4 months and at 2 months of remaining runway, and decide now. Contract work taken at four months is a strategy; contract work taken at three weeks is a fire sale, and the difference is entirely in when you decided.

  6. Runway changes with every price rise, churned customer and new subscription. Put it in a recurring monthly slot and keep it to one line: cash, burn, MRR, date. Founders who check it quarterly discover in month seven that the decision date moved forward five weeks while they were shipping features.

    Kill-or-Continue QuizFull tool
    Input
    9 months runway, MRR growing $180/mo, break-even needs 16 months, 14 customers, low churn
    What comes back
    CONTINUE with a change, not as-is. Low churn on 14 customers means the product works; the arithmetic, not the market, is failing. Highest-leverage move is price, not acquisition — a 40% raise moves break-even inside the runway without a single new customer.

    Run it yourself — free, no signup:

    1. 1.Has anyone paid you actual money for this?

    2. 2.When you stop pushing for a week, what happens?

    3. 3.Of the people who tried it, how many still use it a month later?

    4. 4.Do you have one channel that reliably brings strangers?

    5. 5.Honestly — do you still want to work on this?

    6. 6.In the last month, did you learn something that changed the plan?

    Answer all six for a verdict. None of them ask what you've already spent — that's the point.

Questions founders ask about this

Should I include my own salary in bootstrapped runway?
Yes — count your living costs even when you are not paying yourself. The savings you burn while working unpaid are real money leaving your life, and excluding them typically overstates runway by 50% or more.
How many months of runway is enough for a bootstrapped SaaS?
Twelve months is comfortable, six is workable, and under three forces bad decisions. The more useful figure is whether projected revenue at your decision date covers costs — that comparison tells you whether the time you have is enough.
Does consulting income count as revenue for a SaaS?
Count it as cash, not as MRR. It extends the runway and it hides the trend, so tracking the two separately keeps you honest about whether the product itself is growing.
What's the difference between gross burn and net burn?
Gross burn is everything you spend; net burn is spending minus revenue. Net burn is what divides into cash to give runway, and it is the number that improves every time you raise a price.
How often should I recalculate runway?
Monthly, in ten minutes. It moves with churn, price changes and new subscriptions, and a founder who checks it quarterly loses the ability to act early — which is the entire point of knowing it.

Next, founders usually do this

The tools used above have their own pages — MRR & Runway Calculator and Kill-or-Continue Quiz — and the SOP SOP: Get your runway and burn under control runs the same ground in more depth. Also worth reading: the Nine Lives Doctrine, and real verdicts from ideas kitty has run this workflow on.

kitty.build runs this entire workflow for you

Every step above — the research, the competitor read, the numbers, the honest verdict — is what nine specialist AI boards do automatically when you feed her an idea. She will tell you to kill it if it deserves killing. First idea is free.

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