Anton Kurakin
RUEN
All projects

Incident Cost Calculator

Estimate what a production incident really costs — not only engineering time, but lost revenue, customer support, compensation, and direct recovery spend.

Free calculator

Cost of one incident

Enter what you can estimate. Unknown or irrelevant cost components can stay at zero.

Optional. The name will be included in the ready-to-share summary.
Used only to calculate expected annual impact.
Revenue and customer impact
The period of actual business degradation or unavailability.
Average hourly revenue for the relevant period. Enter 0 if the incident does not directly affect revenue.
Use 100% for a complete stop in sales, less for partial degradation or fallback paths.
Refunds, service credits, discounts, and other direct customer compensation caused by the incident.
People cost
People actively involved in diagnosis, mitigation, and recovery.
This can be longer than incident duration if people join early or keep working after service recovery.
Salary plus payroll taxes, benefits, equipment, and other direct employment cost.
Postmortem, fixes, tests, cleanup, verification, and preventive actions.
Total time from support, operations, customer success, and other teams dealing with the consequences.
Used to translate support and operations hours into money.
Direct recovery spend
Consultants, vendor support, emergency capacity, and other external recovery spend.
Optional: communications, legal expense, extra services, or other measurable incident cost.

Reputation damage, churn, and long-term trust loss are difficult to estimate reliably, so the calculator does not add them automatically. If you have a defensible monetary estimate, include it under “Other direct cost”.

Why this exists

The cost of an incident is rarely the cost of engineers on the call

A large part of incident impact often sits outside engineering: lost revenue, customer support, SLA credits, emergency vendor spend, and follow-up work after service recovery.

This calculator turns reliability from an abstract “we should make the system more resilient” discussion into a financial conversation about the cost of repeating a specific class of failure.