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Most teams find out about downtime from angry users, not from monitoring. Use the calculator below to estimate the real cost of an API outage in lost revenue and churn.
Your subscription revenue per month, in USD.
How long your API was unreachable or returning errors.
Estimated percentage of customers who will cancel because of this incident. Industry average for visible outages: 1-3%.
Estimated cost of this outage
SLA Reality Check
And the real-world dollar cost it represents at $50K MRR with 2% churn impact.
| Uptime SLA | Allowed yearly downtime | Typical annual cost (estimate) |
|---|---|---|
| 99% | 3d 15h 39m | $50,000+ |
| 99.5% | 1d 19h 49m | $25,000+ |
| 99.9% | 8h 45m 36s | $5,000+ |
| 99.95% | 4h 22m 48s | $2,500+ |
| 99.99% | 52m 33s | $500+ |
| 99.999% | 5m 15s | $50+ |
The Detection Problem
Faster detection is the cheapest way to reduce the cost of an outage. Every minute matters.
Average detection time: 30-90 minutes. By the time the first ticket arrives, you've already lost dozens of conversions and have an angry user base.
Average detection time: 60-120 minutes. Your VP of Marketing screenshots a tweet and forwards it to engineering. Bad day for everyone.
Average detection time: under 60 seconds. A WhatsApp or Slack alert in under 10 seconds the moment error rates spike. Fix it before customers notice.
FAQ
It depends on your business model, but the Gartner average across industries is $5,600 per minute of downtime. For SaaS specifically, the cost has two parts: direct revenue loss prorated from your MRR, and churn impact from customers who cancel after a visible incident. Use the calculator above to estimate your specific number.
For most B2B SaaS, a single visible outage causes 1-3% churn from affected customers. For payment APIs, e-commerce checkouts, or critical infrastructure the rate can hit 5-10%. The longer the outage and the more customers it affects, the higher the rate.
Use a monitoring tool that combines external uptime checks (pings from outside your infrastructure) with internal execution monitoring (metrics from inside your server). External pings catch DNS, CDN, and platform outages. Internal monitoring catches slow database queries and silent failures. Tools like Nurbak Watch send alerts via Slack, email or WhatsApp in under 10 seconds when error rates spike.
Three ways: (1) detect failures faster — every minute saved reduces both direct loss and churn impact, (2) communicate proactively with customers during incidents, which dramatically reduces churn vs. silent failures, (3) invest in redundancy for critical paths like checkout and authentication.
Nurbak Watch monitors your Next.js APIs every 60 seconds from 4 global regions. Slack, email or WhatsApp alerts in under 10 seconds. Free tier.
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