See how every hire changes runway instantly.
Every hire changes your runway. The salary is just the beginning: benefits, tools, workspace, and management overhead compound the cost. RunwayCal shows you the full impact of each hire on your burn rate, cash position, and timeline before you make the offer.
You're planning team growth and every hire represents a major financial commitment that extends well beyond salary. Benefits, tools, equipment, and workspace compound the cost. You need to see the exact runway impact of each planned hire, model staggered timelines, compare department-level spending, and understand how your hiring plan affects your path to the next milestone. RunwayCal connects your headcount plan directly to your runway and burn calculations so every hiring decision is informed by its financial consequences.
The challenge
Salary is not the cost
A $120K engineer costs $130K-$145K when you add benefits, tools, equipment, and workspace. Planning based on salary alone means your actual burn rate will exceed your projections. You need fully-loaded cost calculations for every planned hire. The gap between salary and total cost grows with seniority, and underestimating it consistently leads to runway compression that catches founders off guard.
Hiring decisions are runway decisions
Adding 3 engineers at $130K each adds $390K to your annual burn. If your current runway is 18 months, those hires might compress it to 12. You need to see that trade-off before posting the job listing, not after the offer letters are signed. Every hire is a commitment that lasts months or years, and reversing it through layoffs carries its own financial and cultural cost.
No visibility into department costs
Engineering might be 60% of your payroll, but is that appropriate for your stage? How does your payroll distribution compare to your revenue allocation? Understanding payroll by department helps you balance investment across functions. Without this visibility, you make headcount decisions in isolation without seeing how they affect the overall spending balance across your organization.
How RunwayCal helps
Plan hires before making them
Add planned team members with role, department, salary, and start date. RunwayCal immediately shows the runway impact: current runway versus runway with planned hires, additional monthly burn, and total additional spend over 12 months. Compare hiring 3 people now versus staggering them over 3 months. The hiring impact card shows before and after metrics on one screen so you can evaluate the trade-off without switching between tools. Every planned hire saves automatically so you can revisit and adjust as priorities change.
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Hiring timeline
See all planned hires on a timeline with start dates, departments, and monthly costs. The burn trajectory chart shows current burn as one color and additional burn from planned hires as another. Visualize exactly when your burn rate steps up and how it compounds over months. Stagger start dates to smooth the burn increase. The timeline view makes it clear whether you're ramping up gradually or creating a sudden jump in monthly costs.
Learn morePayroll by department
See payroll broken down by engineering, marketing, sales, operations, and executive. Understand which departments consume the largest share of your budget. Track department-level growth over time. Identify whether your spending distribution matches your strategic priorities. If engineering is 70% of payroll but you need more sales capacity, the department breakdown makes that imbalance visible. Use the data to justify reallocation in your board discussion.
Learn moreScenario modeling for hiring
Use the scenario engine to test hiring plans. 'What if we hire 2 engineers and 1 designer?' See the runway impact instantly. Compare aggressive hiring (fill all positions now) versus conservative (hire only the critical role first). Save both scenarios and present them to your co-founder or board. The scenario comparison shows runway, burn, and cash-out month for each path side by side. Make hiring decisions with data backing every recommendation.
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Hiring impact, free to model.
Hiring impact cards are free on all plans. Scenario modeling for comparing hiring plans and saving multiple configurations is available on Founding Access at $199 one-time.
Related product features
Hire with confidence.
See the exact runway impact of every hire before making the offer. Free to start, set up in 5 minutes. Model your entire hiring plan against your runway today.
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