How much capital you'll burn before profitability — and how AI usage costs reshape the math.
This tool calculates how much funding your startup needs. Assuming your expenses are constant and your revenue is growing, it shows when you'll reach profitability and how much capital you'll burn through before then. Once you're profitable, you control your destiny: you can raise more to grow faster if you want.
You can drag the red or green handles to set fixed expense, revenue and growth. Geometrically, the capital needed is the blue-shaded area between the revenue and total-expense curves.
AI / usage costs scale with revenue. The red drag handle is your fixed cost (salaries, rent), which stays flat. But token and infra costs grow with every new user. Use the AI / usage cost slider to set what fraction of each revenue dollar they eat — the expense curve then bends upward to chase revenue. At 100% (zero gross margin) you never become profitable no matter how fast you grow. The slider goes all the way to a 5:1 cost ratio — spending $5 of tokens for every $1 earned.
If you raised exactly the amount calculated and everything goes as expected, your bank account would be at $0 the month you hit profitability, which is kind of stressful. So raise a comfortable margin above it.
By default it shows weekly rates, but there's a button (the change link by the axis) to use monthly, quarterly, or yearly rates. Rebuilt as a standalone page from gitlab.com/tlb/startuptools.