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> Am I being unreasonable? No. Also, yes. > The idea of charging people extra just to say “yeah, I’ll actually provide the service you already paid for” rubs

> Am I being unreasonable? No. Also, yes. > The idea of charging people extra just to say “yeah, I’ll actually provide the service you already paid for” rubs me the wrong way. So this is ultimately the crux of the issue I think. What are you paying for with the up front fee? I don't think I'd be willing to sell anyone a 100% uptime 24/7/365 product for only $1000/month. I'd probably want 2 orders of magnitude more for that guarantee, because my costs would scale significantly in order to deliver that. I'd also need to build in proof to defend it when my product becomes unreachable from your network, because of an issue with your network / your ISP / an intermediate ISP / a hijacking attack / (one of) my ISP(s). The reality is the network (and this is true of almost any IP network) is unreliable, so anything that involves a network should never really be sold with 100% uptime guarantees. If you throw the internet in the middle, you definitely cannot provide that guarantee. Which then brings us to what was actually sold. Setting expectations up front leads to happier trading partners. If you tell me you can deliver 100% uptime for 30 days straight, and it goes down at any point at all in that duration, I'm going to be legitimately upset. If you tell me there's only 99% uptime, and there's a 6 hour outage, the scale of that being a problem for my business is entirely my own problem. I took on a product and the risks were made clear to me up front. If I chose to not take out insurance, the costs to my business are entirely my own. Sometimes that's just the cost of doing business, you can't afford to pay for the insurance. That's one of the risks. It sucks when that happens. Toothless SLA clauses like the one you've described do nothing to mitigate the risk, so should not qualify. Unfortunately, people gloss over the details, but as far as B2B commerce goes, caveat emptor. As an example of a slightly less toothless SLA that I've seen negotiated, and I'm paraphrasing the spirit here: "We will pay you $x to complete this job in 6 months. For each calendar day you are late, you will reimburse us $(x/30), up to a maximum liability of $2x." and then the project was internally scheduled to take up to 9 months. The risk of the contractor was factored in, the expectation that they'd screw up was factored in, and the contractor was heavily incentivised to not screw up (they did anyway)

jrockway 6y ago
> I don't think I'd be willing to sell anyone a 100% uptime 24/7/365 product for only $1000/month. I worked at a company that sold a 24/7/365 product with a 100% uptime SLA for $1000/month. I don't think it really did what anyone wanted. On one side of the coin, people valued the service at more than they paid for it. One customer wrote in to complain that they lost millions of dollars because of a scheduled outage. For a million dollars, you could have had a backup circuit, or at least called us to reschedule the planned maintenance (which we tended to be flexible about, and weren't covered under the SLA anyway). I am not sure what their true motivations were, but I think they assumed that the fine print said "we can guarantee you that there will be no natural disasters, etc." when in reality it said "if our shit turns off, we won't charge you". While the legalese made it clear what the SLA was, the customer's expectation from the simplified wording ("100% uptime") was not what the document said. That is risky in terms of customer satisfaction. Other customers we would refund, but their automated ACH bill payment would send the full amount next month, so we had to track them down to tell them that they overpaid. This resulted in a lot of work for them for some trivial amount of money. We did honor our agreement, but the accounts payable person at the other company ended up having to do a lot of meaningless work that didn't really benefit them -- they don't care if their company pays $900 or $1000 per month for some service. I think we should have just sent them cookies or something as opposed to making them redo all their expense reports for $100 or whatever. At least they would personally be able to enjoy a cookie. Personally, I would never sell someone an SLA without having first measured my uptime extensively, and then I wouldn't sell them something that I've never observed in the past. If we had 5 minutes of downtime last year, I would be hesitant to guarantee 99.999% uptime. I'm not a good business person, though.

jrockway 6y ago

> I don't think I'd be willing to sell anyone a 100% uptime 24/7/365 product for only $1000/month. I worked at a company that sold a 24/7/365 product with a 100% uptime SLA for $1000/month. I don't think it really did what anyone wanted. On one side of the coin, people valued the service at more than they paid for it. One customer wrote in to complain that they lost millions of dollars because of a scheduled outage. For a million dollars, you could have had a backup circuit, or at least called us to reschedule the planned maintenance (which we tended to be flexible about, and weren't covered under the SLA anyway). I am not sure what their true motivations were, but I think they assumed that the fine print said "we can guarantee you that there will be no natural disasters, etc." when in reality it said "if our shit turns off, we won't charge you". While the legalese made it clear what the SLA was, the customer's expectation from the simplified wording ("100% uptime") was not what the document said. That is risky in terms of customer satisfaction. Other customers we would refund, but their automated ACH bill payment would send the full amount next month, so we had to track them down to tell them that they overpaid. This resulted in a lot of work for them for some trivial amount of money. We did honor our agreement, but the accounts payable person at the other company ended up having to do a lot of meaningless work that didn't really benefit them -- they don't care if their company pays $900 or $1000 per month for some service. I think we should have just sent them cookies or something as opposed to making them redo all their expense reports for $100 or whatever. At least they would personally be able to enjoy a cookie. Personally, I would never sell someone an SLA without having first measured my uptime extensively, and then I wouldn't sell them something that I've never observed in the past. If we had 5 minutes of downtime last year, I would be hesitant to guarantee 99.999% uptime. I'm not a good business person, though.