Downtime Cost Calculator

No survey-derived "average cost of downtime" numbers here; they're measured on Fortune 500s and don't transfer. Enter your own figures and get an estimate you can actually defend in a budget discussion.

What the formula covers, and what it can't

Lost revenue here assumes demand during the outage simply disappears. For some businesses it shifts instead: a customer who couldn't check out at 14:00 buys at 16:00, so the true loss is smaller. For others it's the opposite; a failed checkout sends the buyer to a competitor permanently, and the loss is bigger than the window suggests. Adjust the "% of revenue blocked" field to reflect which kind of business you run rather than leaving it at 100.

The response cost line only counts the people firefighting. It ignores the project work they dropped, the context they'll spend the next morning rebuilding, and any SLA credits you now owe customers. If you have contractual SLAs, our uptime calculator tells you how close an incident put you to the threshold.

The cheapest minutes to recover are the first ones

Every outage has two phases: nobody knows yet, and someone is fixing it. The first phase is pure waste; the meter runs and nothing improves. Five-minute check intervals plus an alert that lands in an unread inbox can easily mean 15 minutes of phase one. At the per-minute cost this calculator just showed you, tightening detection is usually the highest-return reliability spend available.