Service Level Agreement
Uptime, response times, and the remedy when they are missed.
A contract, or a section within a larger agreement, that sets measurable performance commitments such as uptime, response times, or resolution times, along with the remedies (credits, termination rights) if those commitments aren't met. It's standard in SaaS and vendor contracts where reliability is part of what's being sold.
- Business days
- 1–5Business days
- Lawyer reviewed
- 100%Lawyer reviewed
- Surprise bills
- $0Surprise bills
What a Service Level Agreement should include
Availability target — the percentage, the measurement window, and what is excluded from the calculation.
Exclusions — scheduled maintenance, customer-caused outages, and third-party failures outside your control.
Support response times — tiered by severity, with a definition of each severity that both sides can apply.
Service credits — the remedy, how a customer claims it, and any cap on total credits.
Sole remedy — whether credits are the only remedy, which is the term most often negotiated.
Reporting — who measures availability and what the customer is entitled to see.
When you need one
When a customer's business depends on your service being up, or when procurement asks for uptime commitments before signing. If your product is not yet operationally ready to meet a number, a commitment you cannot measure is worse than no SLA at all.
How Ruby drafts it
Tell us what you need
Describe the agreement, your business context, and how fast you need it. A few smart questions, not a legal questionnaire. Your price and turnaround are confirmed before anything starts.
Ruby drafts it
Once pricing is confirmed a qualified Ruby lawyer is assigned to your file, and the first draft is built from your answers and real Canadian statute.
A licensed lawyer reviews every line
A lawyer licensed in Canada reviews and finalizes the document before it reaches you, and writes the plain-language summary that comes with it.
Signed, stored, and yours to revisit
You get the final agreement and its summary, stored so you can come back to it rather than hunting through email for the current version.
The fee is set before any of that starts. Hourly billing moves as scope does; a flat fee is one number, confirmed in writing, that doesn’t change after the work is done. See how Ruby prices agreements.
Or did you mean one of these?
These get confused with a Service Level Agreement often enough to be worth ruling out before you buy the wrong document.
Questions people ask
Commit to what you can measure and actually meet, not the highest number you have seen a competitor publish. The gap between 99.9% and 99.99% is roughly forty minutes of allowed downtime a month versus four, and only one of those is survivable without on-call staffing.
In vendor-drafted SLAs, yes — credits are typically stated as the sole remedy for missed targets. Enterprise customers frequently push back and ask for a termination right after repeated failures.
Yes, and often it should, as a schedule. Keeping it separate makes sense when different customers get different commitments.
Looking for the plain definition rather than the document? See Service Level Agreement in the Ruby legal glossary.
This page is general information about Canadian business law and is not legal advice. Laws differ by province and change over time, and how they apply depends on your circumstances. For advice on your situation, speak with a lawyer licensed in your province.
Need a Service Level Agreement?
Ruby drafts it for a flat $799 CAD, confirmed before any work begins, with a licensed Canadian lawyer on every document.