About IncidentCostCalculator.com
An independent calculator for the cost of a security or IT incident: direct response cost, downtime cost, customer impact, regulatory fines, and reputational hit. Five incident scenarios, plus FAIR risk quantification for board reporting. Operated by Digital Signet, founded by Oliver Wakefield-Smith.
Why this site exists
Incident cost calculators online are mostly thin lead-magnets from incident response firms. Enter your industry, get an inflated estimate, get a sales call. The cost figures buyers actually need are gated three layers deep: IR retainer rates behind a sales conversation, breach-cost averages behind a vendor report download form, downtime cost behind a calculator that asks for your email first.
This calculator is the opposite. It takes operational inputs (organisation size, industry, downtime hours, records exposed, vendor count) and returns a working figure with the calculation visible inline so the result can be sanity-checked against the assumption set. No email gate. No sales follow-up. Calculations run in the browser; inputs are not transmitted, logged, or stored.
The figures behind the calculator trace to published research (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report, Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, Ponemon Cost of Insider Risks, FBI IC3 Annual Report, NIST SP 800-61). The methodology page documents which figure traces to which source.
Who runs this site
Oliver runs Digital Signet, an independent AI-development studio that builds data-led pricing and decision tools using public datasets. After 20 years as a solutions architect and tech lead across media, utilities, satellite, and data, he founded Digital Signet to apply autonomous AI development methodology to real software at scale.
Reach Oliver: [email protected]. Profile: LinkedIn.
About the studio
This site is operated by Digital Signet, an independent AI-development studio founded by Oliver Wakefield-Smith. It is part of a portfolio of consumer cost-reference and calculator sites we run as a live R&D lab for our Signet methodology: an autonomous AI development team that ships real software at scale.
Digital Signet does not sell incident response retainers, does not run a forensics practice, does not broker cyber insurance, and does not accept paid placements from any IR firm, insurer, or breach response vendor. Editorial direction is set by Oliver. Drafts are produced via Digital Signet's autonomous AI development methodology and reviewed against the editorial framework before publication.
What this site covers
Ransom, business interruption, forensics, legal, recovery, reputation.
Per-record cost, regulatory fines by jurisdiction, lifecycle impact.
Hourly revenue loss, productivity, SLA penalty, recovery.
Negligent, malicious, credential-theft incident cost by industry.
Cloud, SaaS, MSP, software, outsourced-dev vendor compromise.
ALE / SLE quantification across multiple scenarios, control-ROI.
Healthcare, finance, energy, pharma, tech, manufacturing, retail, government, education.
P1 through P5 cost bands, MTTR, annual range.
NIST SP 800-61 cost share across detection, containment, recovery.
SOC build vs MSSP vs MDR break-even math.
Seven proven strategies with ROI bands and timelines.
Sources, calculation framework, refresh cadence.
Editorial principles
Anchored to public reference material (IBM CODB, Verizon DBIR, Ponemon, FBI IC3, NIST SP 800-61). Specific named publishers per methodology page.
Does not sell incident response retainers, does not run a forensics practice, does not broker cyber insurance. No commercial relationship with any IR firm, insurer, or breach-response vendor cited.
Inputs and assumptions visible on every calculator page. Industry multipliers, per-record costs, hourly downtime bands all show how the result is built.
Reviewed monthly. Last verified June 2026. Cost bands update only when underlying public research shifts.
All freshness labels resolve from one ISO date constant in lib/schema.ts. No drift between footer text, schema dateModified, and on-page banners.
Where industry coverage is sparse, bands widen rather than narrow. A figure of $300K/hr enterprise downtime is honest cross-sector midpoint, not a vendor sales floor.
Related cost references
Sister sites in the Digital Signet network covering adjacent surfaces. Each is independently maintained against the same editorial framework.
Cost-reference sister site: figures by incident type, no calculator.
Data-breach-specific cost reference: per-record, by sector.
Pentest cost by type, scope, and tester credential.
SOC build cost, tooling, retainer rate cards.
PCI DSS cost by merchant level and SAQ type.
GDPR enforcement reference: penalty bands, fine schedule.
Non-affiliation disclaimer: IncidentCostCalculator.com is not affiliated with IBM, Ponemon Institute, Verizon, the FBI, NIST, the AICPA, AT&T, or any incident response, forensics, or cyber insurance vendor. Trademarks and named research belong to their respective owners.
Contact
For corrections, methodology questions, or incident scenarios that do not fit cleanly: [email protected]. For consulting enquiries (fractional CTO, AI product strategy, autonomous-dev-team setup): see digitalsignet.com.