How to Review SaaS SLA Service Credits Before Signing

Finance approved the fee. Sales wants the tool live this week. The leftover exhibit — an attached schedule or appendix — is the SLA. Convert 99.9% and a 10% credit into minutes and pounds on this order form, then read exclusive remedy and any chronic-failure exit as one system. Write a one-page log. Send 3–5 SLA redlines or escalate exclusive-plus-no-exit before anyone signs.

In August 2026 Jordan, ops at a 45-person UK company — same desk that already froze the packet, the exact file set that will be signed — has an £18k SaaS deal on an MSA, a master services agreement vendors hang order forms on. The SLA promises 99.9% and “10% service credits as your sole and exclusive remedy.” Monthly fee is £1,500. A four-hour Friday outage yields a £150 future-invoice discount — if she files within 30 days with vendor-owned logs. No two-of-three-months exit. Sales says everyone signs this.

Disclaimer: Checkory provides AI support, not legal advice. Consult a qualified lawyer for binding decisions.

How do you find the uptime number — and how is it measured?

Write the headline percent as allowed minutes on a 30-day month before anyone debates nines. Confirm the measurement period and who owns the logs. Do not treat 99.9% as a promise of uptime.

On a 30-day month, 99.9% is about 43 minutes; 99.95% about 21 minutes. Match the exhibit’s month basis. Then define downtime or Covered Experiences. Atlassian’s Cloud SLA (effective 30 April 2026) treats a Downtime Minute as an Error Rate above 5% on Covered Experiences — browser flows; APIs and mobile often out — and names its own monitoring as the sole source of truth.

Typical mistake: signing the nines and skipping the clock. In practice Jordan’s four-hour Friday outage already blew a 43-minute budget. Do write allowed minutes and the measurement source. Do not debate 99.9 versus 99.95 until you know what is counted.

How do you map the credit tiers to this month’s fee?

A 10% credit is a future-invoice discount on this month’s fee for the affected product, not a refund and not damages. Map every tier to the order-form number before anyone calls it a penalty.

Jordan’s £18k year is £1,500 a month: 10% is £150, 25% is £375, 50% is £750. Atlassian’s Appendix B uses 10 / 25 / 50% and a 60-minute miss on a 43,200-minute month (99.86% → 10%). GCP Cloud SQL caps Enterprise HA at 50% of that month’s bill; Atlassian can reach 100% of the affected product. Common Paper SLA 2.0 caps credits at 8% of Cloud Service Fees in a Subscription Period and will not pay cash.

For example, published drafts still cluster around 10 / 25 / 50–100% of monthly fees. Do treat the table as a discount schedule. Do not treat unused credits as money in the bank.

Is the credit automatic, or is there a 30-day claim window?

Most vendor paper makes you file. Miss the window and you forfeit the credit even if the status page showed the outage. Calendar the deadline the day you sign, or redline for automatic application.

Atlassian wants a ticket within 15 days after month-end. Common Paper wants 7 days of month-end. GCP Cloud SQL says the customer must request Financial Credit within 30 days or forfeit. AWS Compute wants a claim by the end of the second billing cycle, with logs (policy last updated 25 May 2022).

AWS has one narrow automatic carve-out — a Single EC2 Instance down more than six minutes in a clock-hour is not charged. Do not generalise that rule to a SaaS app. ReviewMyContract still treats a customer-filed window as the default. Unused credits usually die. Do calendar the claim or redline for auto. Do not assume the vendor applies it.

Which exclusions hollow out the SLA?

Scheduled maintenance, emergency windows, third-party products, force majeure, customer-caused outages, and beta or sandbox often zero the counted downtime. If those carve-outs have no hour cap, the 99.9% headline is decorative.

Atlassian excludes force majeure, internet, customer kit, third-party products, scheduled plus emergency maintenance, and sandbox or Beta. GCP Cloud SQL does not count Scheduled Maintenance as Downtime. Common Paper subtracts Excluded Minutes and Scheduled Downtime from the calendar month.

Do cap maintenance hours and demand advance notice, or mark the SLA decorative. Do not nod at “scheduled maintenance is normal” with an open emergency window. A first-pass — the first machine pass that extracts clauses before a human reads every page — can list the carve-outs. A human still decides if leftover minutes are real.

When do sole-remedy credits still allow termination?

Search exclusive remedy and sole and exclusive. Credits as the routine remedy for a single miss can stay. The High flag — an item scored high severity — is exclusive-remedy language plus no chronic-failure exit.

Exclusive remedy plus a tiny credit can be more consequential than the MSA liability cap — the cap is never reached if credits are the only performance remedy. Fees-paid math is the MSA liability cap review guide. The subscribe packet is the SaaS agreement red flags checklist. Do not restart auto-renewal, a DPA — a data processing agreement — or data export here.

Common Paper SLA 2.0 still calls itself the exclusive remedy and still gives the buyer-useful exit: miss in two of any three consecutive months, with timely notices, then terminate and take a prorated refund. Atlassian, AWS Compute, and GCP Cloud SQL typically skip that exit. Carve out chronic failure, data loss, and security. Do add a 2-of-3 terminate-and-refund right. Do not accept exclusive plus no-exit as “standard.”

Keep, raise tiers, or add termination?

Fill a one-page SLA log before Friday: uptime percent, pounds at each tier, claim versus auto, exclusions, exclusive-remedy language, chronic-failure exit yes or no, then keep, raise, or add termination. That filled log is the success bar. Send 3–5 SLA redlines or escalate exclusive-plus-no-exit to counsel — a qualified lawyer, not the chatbot.

Workflow: find the percent and the clock → map the pound tiers → claim versus auto → exclusions → exclusive plus chronic exit → keep / raise / add termination. Keep when measurement is honest, exclusions are capped, and an exit exists. Raise tiers when 10% of £1,500 is theatre. Add termination when exclusive remedy meets no exit — High.

• Freeze the SLA the order form incorporates.
• Write the headline percent as allowed minutes.
• Name who owns the logs and Covered Experiences.
• Map each tier to this monthly fee; write the cap.
• Find auto credit or the claim window; calendar it.
• Ask what unused credits do on termination.
• List exclusions; cap maintenance or mark decorative.
• Search exclusive / sole and exclusive.
• Chronic-failure exit yes or no (2-of-3 / 24–72h).
• Keep / raise / add termination; send 3–5 redlines.