Service Credits

What are service credits?

Service credits are the compensation a vendor gives you when it misses the uptime it promised. Uptime is the share of time the service is available, usually measured each month. The promise and the credits live in the service level agreement (SLA).

A credit is not a cash refund. It is a discount on a future bill, often a percentage of the monthly fee for the affected product. The bigger the miss, the higher the percentage, up to a maximum.

Credits are rarely automatic. In the SLAs we read, you have to ask for them, with evidence, before a deadline.

What it looks like in a vendor's terms

A typical clause reads like this:

If monthly uptime falls below 99.9%, Customer may request a credit of 10% of that month's fees for the affected service, rising to 25% below 99% and 50% below 95%. Customer must submit a request within 15 days after the end of the month. Credits apply only to future invoices, and are Customer's only remedy for downtime.

• Uptime bands: each level of failure earns a fixed percentage, not your actual loss.
• Request window: miss the deadline and the credit is gone.
• Future invoices: no cash back, and nothing if you leave.
• Only remedy: see the section on sole and exclusive remedy below.

The clause above follows the structure of Atlassian's SLA for Premium plans (effective April 30, 2026), which pays 10%, 25% or 50% of the affected product's monthly fees and requires a support ticket within 15 days after the month ends.

Why it matters to you

Credits are sized to your fees, not to your losses. If your sales stop during an outage, the credit is a small share of a monthly bill. The consequential damages exclusion often blocks the rest.

The fine print also shrinks credits further. Some examples from documents we read:

• HubSpot's Product Specific Terms set a 99.95% target, but a credit applies only if uptime falls short in two or more consecutive months. You must ask within 20 days after the month ends.
• Atlassian gives credits only if your account is fully paid with no overdue payments or disputes, and its own monitoring decides whether the target was met.
• An archived Google Compute Engine SLA (2019 version) capped total credits at 50% of the month's bill and required a claim within 30 days, with log files as evidence.

Planned maintenance and events outside the vendor's control are often excluded from downtime. HubSpot's calculation excludes force majeure events and planned maintenance.

What to check

• Find the uptime target and how downtime is defined. Does a partial outage count?
• Note the claim deadline and what evidence you must send. Put it in your support process.
• Check the maximum credit per month.
• Look for a right to terminate after repeated misses. Atlassian's SLA does not provide one.
• Check whether credits are your only remedy, and whether that limit covers data loss or security failures too.

Sole and Exclusive Remedy

A sole and exclusive remedy clause says one specific fix is the only thing you can get for a specific problem. In an SLA, it means the credit is all you get for downtime. You give up the right to sue for your real losses from that outage.

The wording is short and direct. Atlassian states that "Service Credits are Customer's exclusive remedy and Atlassian's entire liability." HubSpot calls its credit the "sole and exclusive remedy for failure to meet Service Uptime commitments." The 2019 Google SLA says it "states Customer's sole and exclusive remedy" for missed uptime.

The law generally lets businesses agree to this. The UCC (the US model law for sales of goods) adds a safety valve: when a limited remedy "fail[s] of its essential purpose", other remedies may become available. Courts split on what follows. A 2019 federal appeals ruling reports that most state courts look at the two separately, so an exclusion of consequential damages can still apply.

So read the scope. A sole remedy limited to "failure to meet uptime" is narrower than one covering "any failure of the service."

How Venpo helps

Venpo monitors your vendors' SLAs and terms and emails you when uptime targets, credit percentages, claim deadlines or remedy wording change, with a plain-English note on what it means for you. The change history shows what the SLA promised when you signed.