Downtime Cost Calculator — What Is Website Downtime Actually Costing You?
Most site owners underestimate what downtime costs because they only count the sales that didn't happen. An outage also burns staff hours on detection, firefighting, and client management, and that time has a price too. Put your own numbers in below to see the real figure.
30 minutes of downtime at your numbers costs an estimated $7 in lost revenue.
How this is calculated
Revenue per minute = monthly revenue ÷ (30 × 24 × 60), i.e. revenue spread evenly across a 30-day month.
Direct revenue lost = revenue per minute × downtime minutes.
Staff cost (if included) = staff count × hourly rate × hours spent.
Total estimated cost = direct revenue lost + staff cost, rounded to whole dollars. Real losses vary with when the outage happens and how concentrated your revenue is; treat this as a floor, not a ceiling.
Why this matters if you manage client sites
For agencies, the number above multiplies across every site in the portfolio, and the client relationship absorbs the damage before the invoice does. A client who discovers their own outage before you do starts wondering what else you're missing, which is how churn conversations begin. If your contracts include uptime commitments, an unnoticed outage can also put you in breach of an SLA you didn't know you were violating. And there's a reputational cost that never shows up in a formula: it's real, it compounds, and it's the hardest one to win back.
Go deeper
Downtime you know about costs less
The staff-time half of your estimate starts the moment an outage begins and nobody knows. Monitoring shrinks it to the length of an alert.
Start free — monitor 10 sites, no card. →