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Enter your revenue, a typical incident, and how often incidents happen. You get the cost of one outage, the cost per minute, the yearly total, and what faster recovery would be worth.
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Share on XShare on LinkedInReliability work is hard to fund because its payoff is an incident that did not happen. A cost per incident changes the conversation. If a 90-minute outage costs $40,000 and there are eight a year, then halving recovery time is worth a known amount, and a proposal for better alerting or automated rollback can be judged against it like any other investment.
Lost revenue is the obvious line, but it is often not the largest. Six engineers pulled off their work for an afternoon, forty support and sales staff unable to use the system, and thirty hours of review and follow-up fixes are all real money, and they apply to internal systems that earn no revenue at all. The calculator spreads revenue evenly across the year, so adjust for your peak hours, and it leaves out the costs that are hardest to count: customers who leave, and the roadmap work that slipped.
Put a number on an outage: lost revenue, the people pulled in to fix it, the people who could not work, and the clean-up afterwards. Use it to size a reliability investment or to explain an incident to the business.
Revenue that stops when the system is down.
Salary plus benefits and overhead.
Staff who cannot do their job meanwhile.
| Lost revenue | $1,096 per hour of outage | $1,644 | 18% |
|---|---|---|---|
| People responding | 6 people for 1.5 h | $692 | 7% |
| People blocked | 40 people unable to work | $4,615 | 50% |
| Follow-up work | post-incident review and fixes | $2,308 | 25% |
| SLA credits and refunds | paid out to customers | $0 | 0% |
Faster detection and rollback.
That is the most you should spend each year on alerting, rollback, and on-call improvements that cut recovery time by 50%, before counting customers who leave.
Revenue is spread evenly over the year, so an outage at peak hours costs more than this and one at 3 a.m. costs less. Lost customers, reputation, and delayed projects are real costs that are not included.