SLA's are sadly uncommon in the SaaS space
by Alex Yumashev ·
Updated Nov 5 2021
After the recent Facebook outage I got curious how many SaaS B2B products have an actual SLA - a Service Level Agreement with a legally binding uptime commitment. Turns out SLA's are very uncommon in the SaaS space. Here's a little comparison table I compiled, just for illustration purpose.
First I tried to remember every well known product like Github, Salesforce or Basecamp. When I ran out of ideas I opened IndieHackers (for the lack of a better "saas database") and went through the most notable bootstrapped products with revenue > $200k/mo. I also asked around (friends and coworkers mostly) and finally filtered the list down to "critical" B2B services only, where an SLA would actually make sense. We can all live without a social media scheduler or an image editor for 5 minutes. But help desk ticketing, issue tracking, payment processing, CRM, project management, email marketing and any form of IaaS (VoIP or ESP) should probably stay up at all times.
For every product I tried googling for "{{product}} sla", "{{product}} service level agreement" or "tos" and looked through the legal docs to find any form of uptime commitment. Here's what I found:
| SaaS | Target uptime | Moneyback |
|---|---|---|
| Intercom | 99.8% | none (right to cancel without penalty) |
| Salesforce | none | none |
| HelpScout | none | none |
| Stripe | none | none |
| Basecamp | 99.99% | 10x refund for the time it was down |
| Slack | 99.99% | 10X refund for the time it was down |
| Freshdesk | none | none |
| Mailchimp | none | none |
| ConvertKit | none | none |
| Zendesk | 99.95% | 10% monthly credit |
| SendPulse | none | none |
| Mailgun | 99.99% | 5% monthly credit for every 30 minutes |
| Gumroad | none | none |
| Zoho | none | none |
| Gitlab | none | none |
| GitHub | none (99.9% for "enterprise") | none (10% quarterly fee for "enterprise") |
| Jitbit 👋 | %99.98 | 10x refund for the time we're down |
| Retool | none | none |
| Ghost | 99.9% | 5% monthly credit for for every hour |
| JivoChat | none | none |
| MailUp | 99% | none |
| Baremetrics | none | none |
| Typeform | none | none |
| Notion | none | none |
| Happyfox | none | none |
| Grasshopper | none | none |
| Less Annoying CRM | none | none |
| Shopify | none | none |
| Sentry | none | none |
| Linear app | none | none |
| Newrelic | 99.8% | none (right to cancel without penalty) |
Notable comments
1. I mean no disrespect to fellow self-funded SaaS bootstrappers, we all have our plates full. Hey, we at Jitbit didn't have an SLA up until recently! So I actually expected the lesser known products to have no SLA, but was really surprised to discover giants like Shopify, Salesforce and Stripe havign no uptime commitment.
2. I might have missed something in my research, many companies publish a spaghetti of PDFs that are hard to get through. Also a couple of companies do promise "best effort" uptime percentage in casual Twitter threads and support forums, but I guess that doesn't count as a legal obligation.
3. Worth noting that all major cloud providers (AWS, Azure, GCP) all have solid SLA's in place
4. Feel free to send more examples and corrections.