Calculating Downtime Cost
Direct costs: lost revenue per minute (ARR/525,600), SLA credit payouts, emergency response labor. Indirect costs: customer churn acceleration, reputation damage, engineering morale impact.
E-commerce: $5,400/min average. SaaS B2B: $1,000-5,000/min. Financial services: $10,000-25,000/min. Healthcare: regulatory + reputation = $50,000+/min.
Use this to justify reliability investments. A $100K investment in redundancy that prevents one 4-hour outage saves $1.3M (at $5,400/min).