Support & Ops

Uptime Cost Calculator

Estimate the cost of downtime. Compare annual cost at your current SLA vs upgrading to the next tier.

Annual cost of downtime/@ 99.9% SLA
$95.4k526 min/yr

Built from your revenue/min, affected users, support surge and a reputational drag of 1.5×. That's the downtime budget your current SLA tier permits.

Per minute
$182
1h outage
$10.9k
Net of upgrade
$7.7k

SLA tier · current

quick-pick
or set custom in inputs →budget · 526 min/yr

Inputs

Business economics

Cost of an outage

By duration
1 min
$182
15 min
$2.7k
1h
$10.9k
4h
$43.6k

Cost = (revenue/min × affected %) × minutes + (support surge × hours), multiplied by reputational factor.

SLA tier comparison

Annual math
99.9% budget
526 min/yr
99.95% budget
263 min/yr
Annual cost @ current
$95.4k
Annual cost @ next
$47.7k
Savings
$47.7k
Upgrade cost
$40.0k
Net gain
$7.7k
Verdict
Upgrade pays for itself.
Payback in ~10.1 months.

The 9s — what each SLA actually costs you

budget · cost @ your inputs
SLA tierDowntime / yearDowntime / monthCost impactAnnual $
99%
2 nines
3.7d
5,256 min
7.3h
438 min
$954.0k
99.9%
3 nines
current
8.8h
526 min
44m
44 min
$95.4k
99.99%
4 nines
53m
53 min
4.4m
4 min
$9.5k
99.999%
5 nines
5.3m
5 min
26s
0 min
$954
99.9999%
6 nines
32s
1 min
3s
0 min
$95
Highlighted band = your current SLA. Bars scale within your inputs — each extra 9 cuts the downtime budget by 10×.

Peak vs off-peak

Outage cost varies by hour of day
1h outage @ peak
$27.2k
1h outage @ off-peak
$10.9k

A 1-hour outage during peak load costs 2.5× a quiet-hour outage. Weight your risk accordingly when scheduling deploys / maintenance.

Gartner 2024 industry benchmarks

Downtime cost per minute by sector
Gartner headline
$5,600/min
average across mid-enterprise orgs. Your model says $182/min.
Industry$/minNote
Retail (e-commerce)$3,200cart-abandonment sensitive
Finance / trading$8,800missed transactions
Healthcare$9,300regulatory + clinical impact
SaaS / software$5,600Gartner average
Manufacturing$4,200halted production lines
Media / streaming$2,500ad-revenue loss
Telecommunications$7,900
Logistics$3,800

Source: Gartner 2024 Downtime Cost Study + ITIC 2024 Cost of Downtime report. Averages across mid-enterprise orgs.

Cumulative yearly projection

Cost accumulation at your current SLA
Q1
131 min$23.8k
Q2
263 min$47.7k
Q3
394 min$71.5k
Q4
526 min$95.4k

Assumes downtime is evenly distributed. Real-world outages cluster — use Gartner's 80/20 heuristic (80% of cost from top 20% of outages) as a second data point.