Put in your revenue, team size and outage length. Get the cost of an incident per minute and in total — a figure you can take to a budget meeting.
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The obvious loss is the revenue that did not arrive while the site was down. It is rarely the whole bill. People who cannot do their jobs still get paid, engineers drop planned work to fix the problem, contracts may trigger service credits, and some customers who met an error page do not come back.
This calculator covers the parts you can put a number on today: lost revenue for the length of the outage, the cost of idle staff, the recovery effort and any contractual penalties. Use the peak multiplier if incidents tend to happen — or hurt most — during your busiest hours.
Annual online revenue divided by the hours you trade, times the outage length. For a store, add the multiplier for sales periods.
Support, sales and operations staff who depend on the system. Use the loaded hourly cost, not just salary.
Engineering hours to diagnose, fix, verify and write up the incident — usually longer than the outage itself.
Churn, damaged reputation, lost search ranking and support tickets afterwards. Real, but hard to estimate; treat the result as a floor.
The yearly figure is your budget ceiling for prevention. If outages cost $40,000 a year and faster detection would cut their length by a third, monitoring and on-call tooling worth a few hundred dollars a month pays for itself many times over. Detection time is usually the cheapest part of an outage to shorten.
Add lost revenue (revenue per hour × hours down), lost productivity (affected employees × hourly cost × hours down), recovery labour and any penalties. Divide by the minutes down for a per-minute figure.
Published averages range from hundreds to many thousands of dollars per minute and mostly describe large enterprises. Your own revenue and headcount give a far more useful figure than any industry average.
If you sell online around the clock, yes — set business hours to 24. For an internal system used 9 to 5, a night-time outage costs recovery effort but little revenue or productivity.
Shorten the outage. Most of the cost scales with time, and the largest avoidable part of that time is the gap between the failure and someone noticing it.
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