How to plan a launch budget that doesn't run out

Most launch budgets are decided by feel at 1am and spent within 20 minutes. Worth doing the arithmetic beforehand instead, since 3 of the 4 line items are knowable in advance.

Where the money goes

Four categories.

Minting. A small fixed cost, effectively negligible against everything else.

Dev buy. Whatever percentage of supply you decide to hold. The biggest single discretionary number for most people.

Visibility. Getting the coin in front of anybody. This is the line item most first-time creators leave at 0.

Reserve. What you hold back to respond with once you know what actually happened.

Notice that only 1 of those 4 is fixed. The rest are decisions.

The split that usually works

Weight it toward visibility, and here's the reasoning.

A dev buy moves the price and creates exactly 1 holder. That's the whole effect. It doesn't produce trades, it doesn't produce unique wallets, and no ranking surface notices it. How dev buys affect the curve covers the mechanics.

Visibility spending produces hundreds of trades across many wallets and puts the coin on surfaces where strangers browse. Different function entirely, and for a coin nobody has found, it addresses the actual problem.

Rough shape: keep the dev buy modest, put more into visibility than feels natural, and hold something back.

Three worked examples

Small, around 60 SOL total. Dev buy at 2 to 3% of supply. Roughly 40 SOL of volume across 4 hours. Small reserve. Enough that your coin doesn't read as untouched during the hours it might get found. What 50 SOL of volume buys works this size through concretely.

Medium, around 250 SOL. Dev buy at 3%. Around 180 SOL of volume across 12 hours, which crosses several time zones and several field conditions. Reserve of 40 or so.

Larger, around 900 SOL. Dev buy still modest, because the percentage matters more than the amount. Around 700 SOL across 48 hours. Meaningful reserve.

Note what stays constant across all 3: the dev buy percentage. Scaling a budget doesn't mean scaling your share of supply, since 20% of supply reads exactly as badly on a large launch as on a small one.

What to hold back and why

Somewhere around 15 to 20% of the total.

Because the useful decision comes after the first few hours, not before. Did anybody arrive? Did the ones who arrived buy? Those 2 answers point at completely different next moves, and you can't know either one in advance.

Spending everything up front means committing to a plan built on assumptions, then watching without options.

The mistake in sizing

Buying one burst instead of a window.

A burst reaches whoever happens to be browsing during those minutes and leaves a cliff in the chart that everybody arriving later can see. The same money across 8 or 12 hours re-enters recency windows repeatedly, reaching several separate audiences. How long a campaign should run covers the trade-off.

Same spend, considerably more of it converted into visibility.

What to check before spending any of it

One thing, and it's free.

Is the page finished? Image loading, description written, socials resolving, dev buy sized sensibly. Sending traffic to an incomplete page produces the same conversion ratio at any budget, so this comes first. The launch checklist covers the 10 minutes.

Then spend, and the console shows the volume, duration, and wallet count a given budget produces with the full cost visible before anything is signed.

Where the money should go

Only minting is fixed. Keep the dev buy percentage modest regardless of budget size, weight the rest toward visibility spread across hours rather than a burst, and hold back a fifth so you can respond to what actually happens rather than to what you guessed.