Downtime Cost Calculator

Put a number on an hour of outage so the argument stops being about opinion.

What you provide

Use 100 to count full revenue. Use your actual gross margin to count profit lost instead.

Result

About $21,200 for 4.0 h down, or $88.33 a minute

Treat this as the floor rather than the bill. It counts the hours and the wages, and it cannot count the orders that went to a competitor and never came back, the support calls that arrive for the next three days, or the contractual credits an SLA may owe. What the figure is genuinely good for is comparison: put it beside the annual cost of the redundancy that would have prevented the outage, and the argument stops being about opinion.

Diagnostic telemetry
Duration
4.0 h
Lost gross profitFull revenue, no margin applied
$20,000
Idle staff time10 people at 60% blocked
$960.00
Recovery effort2 h of cleanup after service returns
$240.00
Total
$21,200
Per minute
$88.33

What this cannot tell you

  • An estimate from the figures you enter. It cannot see your systems, your sales or your incident history.
  • It counts hours and wages only. Customers who leave, support load in the following days, contractual credits and reputation are all real costs it makes no attempt to price, so treat the total as a floor.

Take this with you

Downtime Cost Calculator on RunTheTests — free browser-based sysadmin tools, no sign-up.