Downtime cost calculator
Most businesses know an outage is expensive and have never put a number on it. That gap is why IT spending arguments go badly: one side is describing risk and the other is looking at an invoice.
This works out what a single outage costs in lost productivity and, where relevant, lost trade, then multiplies by how often it actually happens to you.
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Your numbers
Estimates are fine. The point is the order of magnitude, not a precise figure.
How the calculation works
Productivity cost is staff affected, multiplied by their average hourly cost, multiplied by the outage length, multiplied by how much productivity is genuinely lost. That last figure is rarely 100 percent, because people find something else to do, and setting it honestly matters more than any other input.
Revenue impact, where you tick that box, takes your average revenue per working day, converts it to an hourly figure across an eight-hour day, and applies the share of trade that is lost rather than merely delayed. An order postponed by an hour is usually not lost; a walk-in customer who leaves is.
The annual figure is one incident multiplied by how many you have. That number is the one people underestimate, because short outages are forgotten quickly.
What it deliberately leaves out
Overtime spent catching up. Missed deadlines and the commercial consequences. Customer goodwill. Staff morale. The cost of whatever caused the outage. Any regulatory consequence if data was involved.
All of those are real and none are estimated here, which means the number you get is a floor rather than a full picture. That is intentional: a conservative figure you can defend is more useful in a budget conversation than a large one you cannot.
How to use the result
Compare the annual figure against what prevention would cost. If a year of outages costs more than a support contract, the arithmetic has already made the decision and the conversation is about which contract rather than whether.
If the annual figure is small, that is genuinely useful information too. It means your estate is either well run or not very critical, and either way a large IT investment is hard to justify. We would rather you reached that conclusion from your own numbers than from a sales conversation.
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Send us your numbers and we will tell you what they mean
No obligation and no sales sequence. If the honest answer is that you do not need us, that is what you will get. Initial reply within 4 business hours.