Monitoring ROI Calculator

The hard part is getting honest inputs

The formula is straightforward: downtime cost minus what monitoring prevents, minus what monitoring costs. Most people get that far without a calculator. The tricky part is the inputs. Teams undercount incidents because short outages go unlogged. A 3-minute blip that resolved on its own, a cron job that quietly stopped running, an SSL renewal that failed but nobody noticed for a week.

Per-hour cost is even harder to pin down. Revenue loss has a formula. Customer trust doesn't. If you don't have a solid number yet, the downtime cost calculator works it out from your revenue and team size.

That 70% reduction deserves a second look

The default here assumes monitoring cuts downtime by 70%. For a team going from zero alerting to active monitoring, that's actually conservative. Catching a problem in two minutes instead of two hours wipes out most of the damage.

For teams that already run basic health checks, 70% is optimistic. The real percentage depends on what you're watching, how fast alerts reach the right person, and whether anyone actually picks up at 3 AM. A Slack message that sits unread until morning reduces downtime by exactly zero.

Payback period wins more arguments than ROI

A 2,000% ROI looks great on a slide. Nobody in a budget meeting knows what to do with that number. Payback period is what lands: if monitoring costs $19/month and prevents even one two-hour outage worth $1,000, the tool pays for itself before the second invoice arrives.

WatchCron plans start at $7/month and cover uptime, SSL, cron jobs, and ports.