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Estimate money left after variable costs at risk during an API incident and add response labor from an entered operational scenario.
Count business outcomes rather than every request
Many API calls support one transaction or have no direct revenue effect. Use a deduplicated business-relevant rate and account for successful retries. Multiplying every failed request by sale value can overstate loss.
How the calculation works
Unrecovered outcomes = incident minutes × relevant requests per minute × unrecovered fraction. money left after variable costs impact = outcomes × money left after variable costs per outcome. Total estimated impact = money left after variable costs impact + response person-hours × hourly cost + verified direct charges.
A worked example
Sixty minutes at 100 relevant requests per minute with 10% unrecovered outcomes gives 600 outcomes. At two money left after variable costs each, impact is 1,200. Eight response hours at 75 plus 200 credits add 800, for 2,000 total.
Separate response cost and lost money left after variable costs
Response hours include all people working on recovery, without counting the same person-hour twice. Use money left after variable costs after avoided variable costs. Review service credits from confirmed terms rather than guessing a penalty.
What the result leaves out
This does not monitor uptime or predict incidents. A failed technical request is not automatically a lost sale; retries, queues and deferred purchases must inform the unrecovered fraction. Fixed payroll value is not automatically an additional cash outlay.
Open the calculator with your own figures →
The defaults are constructed examples, not market benchmarks. Choose one currency for every monetary input; the currency selector formats values and does not convert exchange rates. Keep a copy of the records and assumptions behind your result so you can repeat the comparison after the next reporting period.
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