Website Downtime Cost Calculator
An outage is never "just an hour of lost traffic." It's lost revenue, wasted ad spend, recovery labor, and a slow SEO hit that compounds if it happens repeatedly. This calculator breaks down the real cost.
Calculate the cost of your next outage
How this is calculated
Downtime cost has four components. Most rough estimates only count the first one — which is why they undercount by 2–3x.
The trust/SEO impact is the softest number, but it's real. Users who hit a dead site are measurably less likely to return. Search engines deprioritize sites that go down repeatedly[citation:15]. We use 20% of direct revenue loss as a conservative proxy — if your outage happens during a promotion, this underestimates it.
The ad spend waste is often the most surprising number. If you're running paid traffic and your site goes down, every click during that window bought a visitor who couldn't convert. At $1,000/month ad spend, a 2-hour outage wastes ~$2.78 — small. But a 6-hour outage during a campaign can waste $8–$25 depending on your rate. It adds up across the year[citation:10][citation:15].
Worked example: An e-commerce store during a sale
An online store does $15,000/month in revenue. They run a sale with $2,000/month ad spend. During the sale, the site goes down for 90 minutes because of a plugin conflict.
- Lost revenue: ($15,000 / 30 / 24 / 60) × 90 = $31.25
- Wasted ads: ($2,000 / 30 / 24 / 60) × 90 = $4.17
- Recovery labor: 3 hours × $75 = $225 (developer emergency rate)
- Trust impact: $31.25 × 0.2 = $6.25
- Total: ~$267
The direct revenue loss was only $31. The recovery labor was 7x that. This is why "cost of downtime" conversations that only count lost sales miss the real number. The labor tax is the biggest line item for most small businesses[citation:10].
Downtime cost by business type
| Business type | Monthly revenue | Cost per hour of downtime |
|---|---|---|
| Personal blog / portfolio | $0 (no direct revenue) | $0–$5 (traffic loss only) |
| Lead-gen business site | Varies (leads) | $10–$50 (depends on lead value) |
| E-commerce store | $5,000 | $7–$15 (revenue / 720 hours) |
| E-commerce store | $50,000 | $70–$150 |
| SaaS / subscription | $20,000 MRR | $28–$60 (subscription revenue continues, but churn risk rises) |
Notice the huge range. A personal blog losing an hour of downtime costs almost nothing. A $50k/month store losing an hour costs real money — plus recovery labor, which is often 3–5x the direct loss for a small team[citation:4][citation:15].