Free calculator · Maintenance and Checklists
Downtime Cost Calculator.
Enter average revenue and how much of it depends on the site being up, and see the cost of an hour, a day and a weekend of downtime in your own currency.
Enter your own revenue figure in this currency. Nothing is converted.
Pick your sector to start from the scope a brief like yours usually needs. Every input stays editable.
Direct sales for a store, or the value of leads it generates for a service business.
100% for a pure online store. Lower for a business that also sells by phone, in person or through other channels while the site is down.
Support tickets, refunds, ad spend still running against a broken page. Enter as a cost per hour.
Cost of one hour offline
AED 39
Based on AED 40,000 a month at 70% dependency, in AED.
A directional number from your own revenue, not a prediction. Reputational cost and lost repeat customers are not counted here and are usually the larger, slower-showing cost.
Estimate done
Want the real number for your project?
An estimate works from typical scope. A quotation works from yours. Send this breakdown over and you get a fixed price back, from the person who would do the work, within one business day.
What this tool measures
Every argument about backups, monitoring and response times comes down to a number nobody has calculated: what an hour offline actually costs. Without it, a care plan looks like an expense. With it, it usually looks like insurance priced well below the risk.
The calculation is deliberately simple, because a simple number you can defend beats an elaborate one you cannot. Monthly revenue, the share of it that depends on the site being reachable, and arithmetic.
How to use it
Enter revenue for the whole business, then set the dependency slider to the share that genuinely stops when the site does. This is the input that matters and the one people get wrong in both directions.
A pure online store is close to total: no site, no orders. A contractor whose work arrives by phone and referral is very low, and honestly saying so is more useful than inflating the number. Picking an industry sets a defensible starting point.
Add your own lines for costs that are not lost revenue: staff sitting idle, a support queue that has to be answered afterwards, an SLA credit you owe someone else.
How to read the result
The hourly figure is an average across all hours, which understates the hours that matter. Most businesses take a large share of a day's revenue inside a few peak hours, so an outage at the wrong time costs several times this number.
The daily and weekend figures are the ones worth remembering, because weekend outages are the common case. They happen when nobody is watching and they are discovered by a customer rather than by you.
None of this includes the cost of losing the customer permanently, or the reputational cost of an outage people noticed. Those are real and they are not calculable here, which means the figure above is a floor.
What to do next
Put this number next to what monitoring and a care plan cost. For most businesses the plan costs less than a single hour of downtime, and that comparison ends the discussion faster than any argument about features.
Then find out how you would learn the site was down today. If the answer is that a customer would tell you, that is the gap, and it is the cheapest one on this list to close.
Questions people ask
Is this the same as an SLA calculation?
No. An SLA is a promise about availability with a credit attached. This is what the unavailability costs you, which is almost always larger than any credit and is the number that should decide what you buy.
What uptime should I expect?
99.9% is a reasonable commitment for standard business hosting and still allows around forty-three minutes a month. If that is too much for your business, the fix is architectural rather than contractual.
Does this apply to a site that does not sell anything?
Yes, at a lower dependency. A site that generates enquiries has a cost per hour of downtime equal to the enquiries not made, and those enquiries do not queue up and arrive later.
Should I include staff cost?
Include it if people genuinely cannot work during an outage. Add it as a custom line rather than inflating the dependency percentage, so the two costs stay visible separately.
Where to go from here
- Hosting and Maintenance Plan Builder — prices the plan this number justifies, at the response time you actually need.
- WordPress Maintenance Checklist — the routine work that prevents most of these outages in the first place.
- Website Migration Risk Checklist — migrations are the single most common cause of avoidable downtime.
Built by GoDesign FZE, who keep business websites online.
Get in touch
Want someone to just do this part?
The tool is free and stays free. If you would rather hand the work over, tell us what you are dealing with and you get a straight answer on scope, cost and timeline.
- You own everythingRepository, hosting and domain credentials sit in your name from day one, not handed over at the end.
- A written timelineMilestone dates are agreed in writing before work starts, so you always know what ships next.
- One business dayEvery enquiry gets a reply from the person who would scope the work, not a sales sequence.
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