"How much would it cost us to be down for a day?" Ask most business owners that and you'll get a shrug and a vague "a lot." Which is fair. It's not a number anyone carries around in their head. But it's worth working out, because once you've got even a rough figure, every decision about how much to spend protecting yourself stops being a guess.
The good news: you don't need a spreadsheet wizard for this. A napkin and ten minutes will do.
Start with the money you'd simply stop making
Begin with the most obvious chunk: the income that just doesn't happen while you're stuck. Take what your business brings in across a normal month, and break it down to roughly what an hour of open-for-business looks like.
Say a shop turns over 40,000 a month and is open around 200 hours in that month. That's about 200 an hour walking through the door. If a system outage means you can't take payments for four hours on a busy afternoon, you've just waved goodbye to something in the region of 800, and that's before anything else enters the picture.
It's a rough cut, not accounting. But even rough, it turns "a lot" into a figure you can actually reason about.
Then add the costs that keep running anyway
Here's what people forget. When you're down, the bleeding isn't only the sales you miss. It's the money still going out the door while nothing comes in. You're still paying your staff to stand around. Your rent, your software subscriptions, your overheads don't pause politely because your server died.
So that four-hour outage isn't just the 800 in lost sales. It's also a chunk of wages paid for work that couldn't happen, plus a slice of every fixed cost that ticked along regardless. The real number is noticeably bigger than the first one you reached for.
And then the part you can't put on the napkin
The hardest costs to count are the ones that show up later. The customer who tried to buy, found you frozen, and quietly bought from someone else, and never came back. The client who starts to wonder whether you're reliable. The reputation ding that doesn't bill you today but shapes who picks up the phone next month.
You can't put a tidy figure on these, and I won't pretend you can. But leaving them off the list is how downtime ends up feeling cheaper than it really is. They're real, even when they're invisible on the day.
What your downtime number is actually for
Here's where it pays off. Once you know that, say, a day down genuinely costs you a few thousand once everything's tallied, the choices you've been putting off get easy.
Two numbers do most of the heavy lifting once you have your figure: how much work you can afford to lose, and how long you can afford to be down. Both are quick to work out, and we cover them step by step in RPO and RTO explained.
Spending a modest amount each month on a setup that gets you running again in an hour instead of two days? If a day of darkness costs thousands, that suddenly reads as a bargain, not an expense. And the reverse holds too: if you run a quiet operation where a day offline genuinely costs you almost nothing, then you've just given yourself permission not to overspend chasing instant recovery you don't need.
A backup alone won't get you running again quickly. A backup is a copy of your data. Disaster recovery is the plan that gets your business back online, and the two are not the same thing. Confusing them is how "we have backups" turns into "we're still down on day three."
That's the whole trick. The figure isn't there to scare you. It's there to right-size what you spend. Too many businesses either pour money into protection wildly out of proportion to the risk, or skimp on it while sitting on far more exposure than they realize. A number on a napkin is what tells the two apart.
If you've never put a number on your own downtime, a second pair of eyes can help sharpen it.
Book a 15-minute call to run your number
No commitment, no sales pitch. Just a clearer picture of what a bad day would actually cost you.