How it works
Burn rate is the sum of deductions over a window divided by its length. Measured per customer, it tells you when to send a low-balance notice and which customers are likely to buy again soon. Measured across the product, it shows whether usage is growing and how much of your sold credit liability is being consumed.
Dividing a balance by the burn rate gives runway: the days until the balance hits zero. Rolling averages over 7 or 28 days smooth out spikes, while sudden changes in burn often signal a new integration, a pricing problem, or abuse.
Example
A customer holds 9,000 credits and spent 4,200 in the last 7 days, a burn rate of 600 per day. Their runway is 9,000 ÷ 600 = 15 days. An email at 5 days of runway, when the balance is about 3,000, gives them time to top up before work stops.
Credit burn rate in Cred
Every deduction is a ledger row with a timestamp, so burn rate is a query over a user's transactions. The dashboard charts issuance and deductions over time, webhooks report each deduction as it happens, and an auto top-up rule can act on low balances for you.
Webhooks docsRelated terms
Questions
- What is a healthy credit burn rate?
- There is no universal number. What matters is that burn grows with active users, that customers repurchase before running out, and that a large share of sold credits is actually used.
- Is credit burn rate the same as startup burn rate?
- No. Startup burn rate is how fast a company spends its cash. Credit burn rate is how fast customers spend credits inside a product.
