Everyone wants a 99.999% SLA—until they see what it costs. Every extra nine comes with real trade-offs: in infra, in people, in cash flow.
The goal isn’t to promise the most. It’s to promise what matters.
And to do it in a way that helps you win deals without blowing up your ops team.
Start With the Dealbreaker Moments
Ask your team and your customers: when does downtime really hurt?
Login failure at 9 a.m.? Bad. Report lag at 3 a.m.? Not so much.
Design your SLA around impact, not uptime vanity. Think response times by severity. RTOs for specific modules. And carve-outs for third-party failures you don’t control.
Avoid the One-SLA-Fits-All Trap
Enterprise wants guarantees. SMBs want speed. Don’t bind everyone to the same commitment.
Tier your SLA. Make the high-touch one part of a premium plan or a paid add-on. That way, you align margin with expectations.
Make Credits the Last Line, Not the First
SLAs aren’t just legal terms. They’re trust signals. Make your posture proactive.
“If we miss X, we’ll notify you.”
“Here’s how we’ll make it right.”
That’s better than hiding behind a form and offering a 2% refund no one files for.
Bake in Observability
You can’t uphold what you can’t see. Define the metrics clearly and expose them.
Uptime dashboards, latency logs, support response times. Transparency builds more goodwill than the perfect number.
Sync Legal with Sales and Support
The biggest SLA screwups happen when legal signs something sales negotiated and support can’t deliver.
Lock down your SLA guardrails. Give sales a menu, not a blank sheet. And make sure support has a playbook for each level.
SLAs shouldn’t be fear documents. They should be part of the pitch.
“We guarantee X. Here’s how. Here’s what happens if we don’t.” That’s not just a promise. It’s a differentiator.
Design yours to protect trust, not just limit liability.
That’s the real edge.
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