Legal
Service level agreement
This agreement sets out what an SLA retainer covers: how quickly we respond, when, how included hours work, and what is outside it. It sits under our master service agreement, and your statement of work names your tier.
We do not promise an uptime percentage. We promise how fast a person responds and what we do next, and we report what actually happened every month.
1. Tiers and prices
The same figures as our pricing page, in each market we invoice in. Annual cover is paid in advance at ten months for twelve months of cover.
| Tier | USD | EUR | KES |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | from $500 per month; from $5,000 per year prepaid | from €450 per month; from €4,500 per year prepaid | from KES 55,000 per month; from KES 550,000 per year prepaid |
| Standard | from $1,000 per month; from $10,000 per year prepaid | from €900 per month; from €9,000 per year prepaid | from KES 110,000 per month; from KES 1,100,000 per year prepaid |
| Critical | from $2,000 per month; from $20,000 per year prepaid | from €1,800 per month; from €18,000 per year prepaid | from KES 225,000 per month; from KES 2,250,000 per year prepaid |
| Tier | Hours of cover | Included engineering | Monitoring |
|---|---|---|---|
| Essential | Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:00 EAT | 4 hours of engineering a month | Uptime checks every 5 minutes, alerting us |
| Standard | Monday to Friday, 08:00 to 20:00 EAT | 10 hours of engineering a month | Uptime, error tracking, and performance checks, alerting us |
| Critical | P1 on any day, weekends included. Everything else Sunday to Friday, 08:00 to 20:00 EAT, with Saturday best effort rather than guaranteed | 20 hours of engineering a month | Uptime, error tracking, performance budgets, and log alerting |
2. Response times
| Priority | Essential | Standard | Critical |
|---|---|---|---|
| P1: System down, no workaround | 4 business hours | 2 hours | 1 hour, any day |
| P2: Major function broken, workaround exists | 1 business day | 4 business hours | 4 hours |
| P3: Minor issue, question, or small change | 3 business days | 2 business days | 1 business day |
A response means an engineer has read your report, acknowledged it to you, and started work. It is not an automated reply, and it is not a resolution: the time to fix depends on the problem, and we tell you what we know as we learn it.
You set the priority when you raise an issue. If we think it belongs in a different one, we say so and agree it with you rather than quietly changing it.
3. When we are working
Times are East Africa Time (UTC+3), which does not change for daylight saving. Business hours and business days are those in your tier's hours of cover.
The exception is critical priority on the tier that offers it: a P1 on that tier is answered on any day, weekends included, within its stated target.
Kenyan public holidays are not business days on any tier. We cover them on a best-effort basis, as described below, and a P1 on the tier that answers it on any day is still answered within its stated target.
On the Critical tier, business hours are Sunday to Friday, 08:00 to 20:00 EAT. Saturday is not a business day on that tier and is covered on a best-effort basis only.
- Best effort means that we acknowledge and work on a request raised on a best-effort day, including a Kenyan public holiday, where we are able to, without being obliged to.
- No response-time target applies on a best-effort day, and time on that day does not count towards any response target.
- A request raised on a best-effort day that we have not answered is treated as raised at the start of the next business hours, and its response target runs from then.
- No service credit, fee reduction or other remedy arises from the time taken to respond on a best-effort day, and that time is never reported as a missed target.
- Best effort does not apply to a priority your tier answers on any day. On the tiers above, a P1 is answered within its stated target on every day, including a best-effort day.
4. Included hours
Each tier includes a number of engineering hours a month. We log time against your tickets as we work, and the log is in your monthly report. Time spent fixing a defect that was ours is never counted against your hours.
Unused hours do not roll over. What you pay for is capacity held open for you, not a block of hours in a drawer.
If a month runs over, nothing is charged automatically. After the month closes we send you the figures and agree with you what happens next: absorb it, move to a larger tier, or quote the extra work.
5. What is covered, and what is not
Covered: incident response within the targets above, dependency and security patching on your tier's schedule, the monitoring your tier lists, small changes within your included hours, and the monthly report.
- Not covered: outages of services outside our control, such as your hosting provider, a payment gateway or another third-party API. We help you diagnose and work around them, but the response targets do not run against a third party's outage.
- Not covered: problems caused by changes you or another supplier made without telling us. We will help, as billable work.
- Not covered: new features. They are quoted as new work.
6. What we need from you
- Access to the systems we support, granted through a secure channel and kept current.
- A named contact who can make decisions, and a deputy for when they are away.
- Notice before you or another supplier changes the systems we support.
- Issues raised through the client portal, or by phone for a P1, so the clock starts from a record.
7. Escalation
If a response is late, or you disagree with how an issue is being handled, call us, then email, and it comes straight to the founder. The Critical tier also gets a written escalation path agreed at onboarding.
8. The monthly report
Every month you receive a report: uptime as our monitoring measured it, incidents, how quickly we responded against the targets, patches applied, and hours used. Its figures are calculated by our systems and locked when the report is published. We add an explanation where one is useful; we do not edit the figures.
9. Suspension for non-payment
SLA cover is suspended at 30 days overdue until the account is current. After 14 days overdue we charge interest at 2% per month on the outstanding balance. We send reminders before either happens.
10. Term and notice
A monthly retainer renews each month until either of us ends it with 30 days' written notice. An annual prepaid term runs for its twelve months.