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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–$147, 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.

Frequently asked 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–$147 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.

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