Rex says
Money math without the spreadsheet headache. Plug in your numbers and I'll show you exactly where the dollars land.
Try a scenario
Click to load — tweak from there.Inputs
Result
Total incident cost
$6,774
Cost per minute of downtime
$151
Revenue loss portion
$1,234
Responder labor cost
$540
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One click, a permanent link with your numbers baked in.
How to use this
- 1Enter monthly revenue ($).
- 2Enter % of revenue-generating traffic affected (%).
- 3Enter incident duration (minutes).
- 4Enter engineers/staff responding.
- 5Enter loaded hourly rate per responder ($).
- 6Enter sla credits owed ($).
- 7Read your total incident cost on the right — it updates as you type.
- 8Hit Share to keep the scenario or send it to someone.
About this calculator
When leadership asks 'what did that outage cost us,' teams usually reach for lost revenue and stop there, missing the larger and more persistent costs: engineer time during the incident (often 5-15 people paged simultaneously), customer support surge, SLA credits owed to affected customers, and a churn effect that plays out over following months. This calculator adds up direct revenue loss (based on your revenue run-rate and traffic-affected percentage), responder labor cost (headcount × loaded hourly rate × duration), and SLA credit obligations, then reports both per-minute and total incident cost. Use the per-minute figure to justify reliability investment: if an outage costs $2,400/minute and a redundant failover system costs $50,000 to build, the system pays for itself the moment it prevents 21 minutes of downtime across its lifetime.
Worked example
Using the values the calculator loads with:
Inputs
- Monthly revenue: 2000000 $
- % of revenue-generating traffic affected: 60 %
- Incident duration: 45 minutes
- Engineers/staff responding: 6
- Loaded hourly rate per responder: 120 $
- SLA credits owed: 5000 $
Results
- Total incident cost: $6,774
- Cost per minute of downtime: $151
- Revenue loss portion: $1,234
- Responder labor cost: $540
What each field means
Inputs
- Monthly revenue ($)
- The monthly revenue used in the calculation, measured in $. Starts at 2000000 $ so you have a working example on load.
- % of revenue-generating traffic affected (%)
- The % of revenue-generating traffic affected used in the calculation, measured in %. Starts at 60 % so you have a working example on load. Accepted range: 0–100 %.
- Incident duration (minutes)
- The incident duration used in the calculation, measured in minutes. Starts at 45 minutes so you have a working example on load.
- Engineers/staff responding
- The engineers/staff responding used in the calculation. Starts at 6 so you have a working example on load.
- Loaded hourly rate per responder ($)
- The loaded hourly rate per responder used in the calculation, measured in $. Starts at 120 $ so you have a working example on load.
- SLA credits owed ($)
- The sla credits owed used in the calculation, measured in $. Starts at 5000 $ so you have a working example on load.
Results
- Total incident cost
- Returned as a money amount in US dollars and shown as the headline result. It recalculates instantly whenever you change an input, so you can compare scenarios without reloading.
- Cost per minute of downtime
- Returned as a money amount in US dollars. It recalculates instantly whenever you change an input, so you can compare scenarios without reloading.
- Revenue loss portion
- Returned as a money amount in US dollars. It recalculates instantly whenever you change an input, so you can compare scenarios without reloading.
- Responder labor cost
- Returned as a money amount in US dollars. It recalculates instantly whenever you change an input, so you can compare scenarios without reloading.
FAQ
Should I count 100% of revenue during the affected window?
No — only the share of revenue-generating traffic actually blocked by the failure, and account for deferred versus lost demand. Some transactions (a subscription renewal) simply happen a few minutes later once the system recovers, while others (a cart abandoned during checkout) are genuinely lost, so the affected percentage should reflect your best estimate of true lost transactions, not just error rate.
What costs does this leave out?
Reputational damage, customer churn triggered by the outage (which plays out over the following 1-3 months and is hard to attribute cleanly), regulatory exposure for compliance-sensitive industries, and the opportunity cost of engineers pulled off roadmap work during and after the incident for the retro and remediation. Treat this calculator's output as a conservative floor, not the full cost.
How should this number change how we prioritize reliability work?
Compare the per-minute cost against the cost and expected downtime-prevention of a proposed fix, using your incident history to estimate how many minutes of downtime per year the fix would have prevented. A fix that costs $80,000 and would have prevented three 30-minute incidents at $2,000/minute pays for itself in the first prevented incident and every one after that is pure savings.
Accuracy and limitations
- Results are estimates before tax, fees, and inflation unless an input explicitly covers them.
- Rates are treated as fixed for the whole period — variable-rate products will drift from this projection.
- This is educational maths, not financial advice. Check anything contractual with the lender or your accountant.
Related tools
Cite this calculator
Writing about this topic? Grab a citation — every link helps keep these tools free.
RevenueLab. (2026). Incident Cost Per Minute Calculator. Retrieved from https://www.revenuelab.fyi/toolbox/incident-cost-per-minute
<p>Source: <a href="https://www.revenuelab.fyi/toolbox/incident-cost-per-minute" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Incident Cost Per Minute Calculator — RevenueLab</a> (2026).</p>
Source: [Incident Cost Per Minute Calculator — RevenueLab](https://www.revenuelab.fyi/toolbox/incident-cost-per-minute) (2026).