Updated 25 October 2026 · By the Upcertain team
From target to budget
| Target | Budget per 30-day month | Per week |
|---|---|---|
| 99.5% | 3 h 36 m | 50 m 24 s |
| 99.9% | 43 m 12 s | 10 m 5 s |
| 99.95% | 21 m 36 s | 5 m 2 s |
| 99.99% | 4 m 19 s | 1 m 0.5 s |
The uptime calculator works out any other target and period.
What spends the budget
- Deploys that fail briefly. Twenty deploys a month that each fail for 60 seconds spend 20 minutes, almost half of a 99.9% budget.
- Incidents. One 30-minute outage spends most of the rest.
- Slow detection. The minutes between failure and someone noticing count too. A 5-minute check interval can cost several minutes per incident before anyone starts work.
- Maintenance, unless your target excludes planned windows.
Measure it
You need two things: monitoring that sees short failures, and incidents that start at the first failure rather than the moment someone noticed. Check every 30 seconds to 1 minute so 1- and 2-minute outages are counted at all; see check intervals. Upcertain records each incident from the first failed check and reports uptime over 24 hours, 7, 30 and 90 days.
Confirmation checks keep short failures from alerting anyone, and failures that never become incidents do not open an incident record. If you want deploy blips in the budget, look at the monitor's check log as well as its incidents.
Spend it on purpose
- At the start of the month, the whole budget is available for shipping.
- When an incident spends more than half of it, slow down risky changes until the end of the month.
- When the budget is gone, ship only fixes that make things more reliable.
- When a month ends with most of the budget unspent, you can afford to move faster, or promise customers a higher target.
Make deploys cheaper
For most small teams the cheapest minutes to win back are deploy minutes: rolling restarts, readiness checks and connection draining. The deploy guide lists them.
Publish what you promise
Whatever target you choose, a status page with real uptime history keeps you honest with customers and with yourselves. It is harder to argue that last month was fine when the bars say otherwise.