Cost of downtime
Downtime cost calculatorwhat an outage is costing your shop today
The most expensive hour of a small-shop month is usually the one when checkout quietly returns 200 but nothing completes. This calculator sizes the same outage in dollars — daily revenue on the left, hours of downtime on the right, the cost of doing nothing on the bottom. The math is intentionally simple so a non-engineer can defend it to a partner, a developer, or a credit card.
It is illustrative. Trust loss, recovery revenue, and the compounding effect of a quiet checkout page that returns a 200 are not on the spreadsheet. The figure below should be read as a floor, not a ceiling — and as the cheapest subscription tier that closes the gap on the same problem.
Inputs
What a normal business day brings in across every channel.
Total hours per month the site is unreachable. The article uses 4 hours; raise it to match what your incident history looks like.
What you'll see
- Monthly cost of your current downtime hours at your current daily revenue.
- Annualised figure — what a year of the same outage shape adds up to.
- Hourly rate, so you can size any future outage in seconds.
- A side-by-side sense of how a 2-minute detection cadence (SiteGuardian's floor) lands against a 6-hour customer-email latency.
Methodology
What the math is and what it is not.
Daily revenue ÷ 24 = an effective hourly rate. That rate × the hours of downtime per month = a monthly cost. Times twelve = an annual cost. No weighting, no compounding, no creative variables. Defaults reflect the long-form piece on small-business downtime cost: a $500 daily revenue × 4 hours of downtime a month ≈ the $400–$3000 window the article defends.
What this is not: it is not a recovery model, it is not a trust-loss model, and it is not a churn multiplier. The trust loss — the customers who land on a "site offline" page during the outage and do not come back — is a real number and not on this calculator. A major outage usually runs a multiple of the recovery-only figure shown here.
Common questions
The same five questions, answered plainly.
What assumptions does this calculator make?
It assumes a flat daily revenue across the year, that downtime hours are evenly distributed across the month, and that downtime means orders, signups, or checkout cannot complete. It does not model compounding trust loss, recovery revenue, or referral leakage — those are real and not on the spreadsheet.
Why is downtime the variable, not the rate of customers lost?
The number that drives the subscription decision is how many hours per month the site stops answering. Recovery-rate math (how many of those customers retry tomorrow) is downstream of detection latency — same revenue, different detection cadence, different dollars saved. Detection latency is the variable the calculator anchors on.
What counts as downtime?
Any window where the homepage, a key landing page, the contact form, or checkout returns an error or fails to load. SSL padlock errors, 500 responses, slow-but-eventually-responding pages, and checkout-redirect failures all count. The number that matters is the one you could honestly bill a customer for not getting.
Is the figure optimistic?
It is probably optimistic. The calculator is a first-pass revenue-loss dollar figure. The trust loss — the customer who lands on a "site offline" page and never comes back — is not on this spreadsheet, and is usually a multiple of the direct revenue number. Treat the result as a floor, not a ceiling.
How does monitoring reduce this number?
A two-minute detection cadence instead of finding out from a customer email in six hours cuts the cost of the same outage to roughly twenty minutes of revenue, not four hours. The /pricing surface walks through which subscription tier fires at that cadence.
From estimate to answer
Stop reading about monitor outages. Start running one.
The free URL audit walks the same check against your actual site — uptime, SSL, broken links, checkout, performance, SEO metadata — under thirty seconds. The number above is what an outage would cost; the audit tells you what you are about to lose it to.
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