free_tool
Downtime Cost Calculator
Reliability is easy to defer until you price it. Enter your revenue and current availability to see what an hour offline costs, your annual exposure, and exactly what each additional "nine" is worth, so the reliability conversation stops being abstract.
Cost of one hour down
$571/hr
$9.51 / minute of revenue at risk
8.76h of downtime a year at this tier.
Annual cost by availability
That's the price of the status quo. Closing the gap between tiers is usually cheaper than one bad outage. I'll help you find the highest-leverage fixes.
Put a number on your risk: book a callA planning estimate, not your P&L. Revenue/hour is annual ÷ 8,760; downtime hours come straight from the availability gap. Share the link to align engineering and finance on the same number.
how_it_works
Why each "nine" is worth real money
Going from 99.9% to 99.99% cuts allowed downtime from about 8.8 hours a year to 53 minutes. Multiply the hours you remove by what an hour costs and you get the value of the next nine, usually far more than the engineering to earn it.
The model keeps you realistic: revenue lost while down is rarely 100% (some sales just shift later), so dial it to what's realistic for you, and add the team's firefighting cost to capture the hours an incident burns beyond the outage itself.
faq
Questions & answers
- How does the Downtime Cost Calculator work out the cost of an outage?
- It divides your annual revenue by 8,760 hours to get revenue per hour, applies the share of revenue actually at risk while you are down, and adds an hourly engineering firefighting cost. That gives an effective loss per hour, which it multiplies by the downtime each availability tier allows.
- What does the revenue at risk percentage do?
- It is a dial you set, because not all revenue is lost during an outage: some sales shift to later or continue through other channels. Lowering it from 100% gives a more defensible figure than assuming every dollar vanishes.
- What is each additional nine of availability worth?
- The tool prices downtime at every tier from 99% to 99.999% so you can see the annual cost at each one. The drop in cost when you move up a tier is what the next nine is worth, which makes the reliability investment case concrete.
- Are my revenue numbers sent anywhere?
- No. The calculation runs entirely in your browser and nothing is transmitted to a server. Inputs are only placed in the URL if you copy a shareable link.
- Does it include reputation damage or customer churn?
- No. It covers lost revenue and engineering cost only, so it leaves out reputation harm, churn, SLA penalties and opportunity cost. Treat the result as a conservative floor, not the full impact.
Want these numbers pressure-tested on your stack?
I'll review your inputs and tell you where the real cost and risk are. Book a call, or leave your email and I'll reach out.
Prefer proof first? See how this plays out in real case studies →