Cost calculator
What does an eRA outage actually cost you?
Not what a new system costs — what the current one costs when it stops. Three inputs, arithmetic you can check, and every assumption written down underneath.
Estimated productivity cost
$34,400
- Central office
- 6 × $50 × 8 hours
- Everyone else
- 40 × $100 × 8 hours
And if the outage costs you a deadline
$100,000 – $500,000
One proposal, missed because the system was down — and only worth this if it was one you would have won. It does not add to the figure above; it is a different kind of loss.
Both numbers are the cost of the system you already have, on a day it does not work. Neither is a price for anything we sell.
Read this before you quote the number
What the estimate assumes
$50 an hour for central staff
A loaded hourly cost for a sponsored programs office employee — salary, benefits and overhead, not take-home pay. Your finance office has the real number and it will not be far off this.
$100 an hour for everyone else who touches a proposal
Higher because this group is mostly faculty and research staff, whose loaded cost is higher and whose time was already the scarcest thing in the building.
Everybody stops
The estimate assumes the outage blocks the people who were going to work on proposals that day. In a real outage some of them find something else useful to do, so treat this as the top of the range rather than a bill.
The opportunity cost assumes you would have won
It is the value of one proposal that missed its deadline — and it only counts if that proposal would have been funded. Read it as the ceiling on what a single missed submission can cost, not as money you lost. Multiply by your actual hit rate to get something you would defend in a budget meeting.
One missed deadline, not the year
The second figure is a single submission. An outage that takes out a federal deadline week can take several, and this page does not try to guess how many — that number is yours, and it is the one worth arguing about.
An estimate whose assumptions are hidden is a sales tool. These are the rates the original version of this calculator used, and they are on the page so you can substitute your own before anyone takes the figure into a meeting.