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What would a breach actually cost you?

Put a number on the risk. Estimate the real cost of a data breach for your business — records, notification, downtime and recovery — from IBM's 2026 averages. Nothing leaves your browser.

Estimated breach cost
$872k
Records & notification$800,000
Investigation & remediation$60,000
Downtime (~6 days)$11,538

A manual audit that finds the hole before someone else does costs $49–$299 — a rounding error against the number above.

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A rough estimate from IBM/industry 2026 averages, not a prediction. Real breach costs swing widely — the point is the order of magnitude.

Why 'we're too small to be a target' is the expensive mistake

Small businesses are not too small to breach — they are the easiest to breach, because the defences are thinner. And the cost does not scale down with the company: the investigation, the legal advice, the notification obligations and the downtime all land the same whether you have five customers or fifty thousand. That is why a breach so often closes a small business outright.

This calculator turns that abstract risk into a figure you can actually compare against the cost of preventing it. The comparison is rarely close: an audit that finds the weakness first costs a rounding error against what a breach costs after the fact.

Common questions

How much does a data breach cost a small business?
IBM’s 2026 report puts the average breach at around $3.3 million for organizations under 500 people — but that average is dragged up by large incidents. For a genuinely small business the figure is lower, yet still frequently company-ending, because the fixed costs (investigation, notification, downtime, legal) land no matter how few records you hold. The per-record cost of customer PII averages about $160.
What actually makes up the cost of a breach?
Four things. Per-record costs: notifying affected people and the fallout per record. Investigation and remediation: finding what happened and fixing it. Downtime: revenue lost while systems are offline, which for a small business can be the biggest line. And the long tail: legal, regulatory fines, and lost customers who never come back.
Is this calculator accurate?
It is an estimate grounded in published 2026 averages, not a prediction. Real breach costs swing enormously depending on what was taken, how fast it was caught, and your industry. The value is the order of magnitude: it turns an abstract risk into a number you can weigh against the cost of preventing it.
How does an audit reduce this cost?
Most breaches exploit a known, findable weakness — an unpatched component, a broken access control, an exposed admin panel. A manual audit finds those before an attacker does, which is why the maths is so lopsided: a $49–$299 audit against a five, six or seven-figure breach. Prevention is not just cheaper than the cure; for a small business it is often the difference between surviving and not.

Keep reading

Cost to fix a hacked siteWhat cleanup actually runs to.Pentest Cost CalculatorThe cost of prevention.Subdomain FinderSee your exposure right now.Manual audit from $49Find the hole before they do.

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