Downtime Cost Calculator
Find out exactly how much vendor and SaaS downtime is costing your team — in dollars.
Calculate your downtime cost
All calculations happen in your browser. Nothing is sent to our servers.
Use industry benchmarks:
people
$
/hour
Include salary + benefits + overhead. Typical dev/IT rate: $65–$120/hr.
incidents
Cloud services average 15–25 incidents per month across a typical vendor stack.
minutes
Industry median is ~60 minutes. Incidents detected early resolve much faster.
Your Downtime Costs
Per incident
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Per month
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Per year
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Cost breakdown
Direct cost (lost work time)
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Indirect costs estimate (×2 multiplier)
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Indirect costs include incident response, customer comms, and reputation impact. Source: Gartner (2–3× direct cost).
IsDown Premium Plan: $80/mo
Your downtime cost: —
ROI
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Turns out downtime is expensive. IsDown makes sure you're the first to know.
Monitor all your vendor status pages in one place. Get real-time alerts in Slack, PagerDuty, or email the moment an incident is detected.
Reduce your downtime cost — Start free trial →Industry Benchmarks
Average downtime frequency and duration by industry. Sources: Gartner, IDC, Pingdom.
| Industry | Avg hourly rate | Incidents / mo | Avg duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| SaaS / Tech | $75 | 20 | 45 min |
| Financial Services | $120 | 15 | 35 min |
| E-commerce | $100 | 18 | 50 min |
| Healthcare | $90 | 12 | 60 min |
| General / Other | $65 | 15 | 45 min |
Click any row to apply those benchmarks to the calculator.
What Is the Real Cost of SaaS Downtime?
When a vendor goes down — your payment processor, your CRM, your CI/CD pipeline — it doesn't just mean the service is unavailable. It means your team stops. Engineers wait. Support tickets pile up. Customers ask questions you can't answer. The longer the incident, the more it compounds.
Most teams underestimate this cost because it's spread across many people in small increments. A 45-minute Stripe outage affecting 10 engineers at $75/hour is $562.50 per incident — and that's just the direct cost. Gartner's research puts the total economic impact at 2–3× the direct figure once you account for incident response, customer communications, and the downstream revenue effects.
The key variable is detection time. Teams that find out about an outage immediately can activate workarounds and communicate proactively. Teams that find out 30 minutes later — because someone happened to notice a feature wasn't working — pay a much higher cost. IsDown monitors your vendors' official status pages and sends alerts the moment an incident is posted, so you're never the last to know.
Frequently Asked Questions
How much does downtime cost per hour?
The cost varies significantly by team size and industry. For most engineering and IT teams, the direct cost is: (team size) × (hourly rate) per hour of downtime. For a 10-person team at $75/hr, that's $750/hour. Gartner estimates average enterprise downtime costs $5,600/minute — but for most B2B SaaS teams the number is in the thousands per hour, not millions.
How do you calculate the cost of downtime?
The standard formula: Cost per incident = (team size × hourly rate × duration in minutes) / 60. Multiply by monthly incident frequency to get your monthly figure. Apply a 2× indirect cost multiplier (Gartner's conservative estimate) to account for incident response overhead, customer impact, and reputation costs. Our calculator above does this automatically.
What is the average cost of IT downtime?
According to IDC, the average cost of infrastructure failure is $100,000/hour for large enterprises. For small-to-mid-size tech teams, research suggests the range is $10,000–$50,000/hour when accounting for all affected staff. The most reliable way to calculate your specific number is the formula above, using your actual team size and fully-loaded hourly rate.
What are indirect downtime costs?
Indirect costs include: engineering time diagnosing and communicating incidents, increased customer support volume, customer churn and lost revenue, delayed feature releases, and executive time in post-mortems. Gartner cites these at 2–3× the direct productivity cost. Our calculator uses the conservative 2× multiplier to keep estimates defensible for budget conversations.
How can I reduce downtime costs?
The fastest lever is reducing detection time. When your team knows about an outage immediately, they can activate workarounds, pause dependent work, and communicate proactively — turning a 60-minute productivity loss into a 5-minute one. IsDown monitors all your vendor status pages and sends instant alerts to Slack, PagerDuty, or email, so your team is always the first to know.
Be the First to Know When Vendors Go Down
Monitoring all vendors in one place
Real-time Slack alerts when outages occur
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