Downtime Cost Calculator

Beyond direct revenue loss: lost productivity (engineers firefighting, support handling tickets), customer churn (users switching to competitors), SLA penalty credits (10-30% of monthly bills), brand damage (trust erosion), and regulatory fines for compliance-critical services.

SaaS companies face direct revenue loss (customers can't use the product) plus high churn risk (users evaluate alternatives during outages). A 99.9% SLA breach can trigger credits of 10-30% of monthly bills. Repeated outages accelerate churn — 32% of customers stop doing business with a brand after one bad experience (PwC).

Yes. Calculate the hourly cost of: engineers working the incident, support handling tickets, and management coordinating the response. For a 2-hour outage with 5 engineers ($150/hr each) + 3 support ($50/hr) + 1 manager ($100/hr), that's $1,900 in labor alone, on top of revenue loss.

Compare monitoring cost ($100-1000/month) vs potential downtime cost. If one 30-minute outage costs $5,000, monitoring that prevents it has 100-500x ROI. Plus, faster detection (30s vs 30min) can reduce MTTR by 50%+, cutting incident costs in half.

Industry averages per hour: Financial services: $5.6M, Manufacturing: $260K, Healthcare: $636K, Retail/E-commerce: $1.1M, Media: $90K. Regulated industries (finance, healthcare) also face compliance fines on top of revenue loss.

Three levers: Faster detection (monitoring reduces MTTD from minutes to seconds), faster recovery (runbooks, automation, incident management), and fewer incidents (reliability engineering, testing, chaos engineering). The biggest ROI is usually faster detection.

Monitoring reduces MTTD (Mean Time To Detect). Without monitoring, you find out when users complain (5-30 minutes). With monitoring, you know in seconds. If downtime costs $1,000/min, catching an issue in 30 seconds vs 30 minutes saves $29,500 per incident.

Yes, if downtime cost justifies it. Multi-AZ deployments, load balancing, and automatic failover can prevent most single-point-of-failure outages. Compare the cost of redundancy (extra infrastructure + engineering time) vs the cost of a typical outage. If one outage costs more than a year of redundancy, it's worth it.

DR plans ensure business continuity after catastrophic failures (entire region down, data loss). Your RTO (Recovery Time Objective) should match your downtime cost tolerance. If you lose $10K/hour, an RTO of 4 hours means you're willing to lose $40K in a worst-case scenario. Test your DR plan quarterly.

Warden checks your endpoints every 30 seconds and alerts instantly when issues are detected. This catches problems before users notice, reducing MTTD to near-zero. Faster detection = shorter outages = lower costs. If you prevent just one 10-minute outage, Warden pays for itself many times over.