Oh wow, that's a nightmare scenario. So the export was just... incomplete, and you only found out later.
> relies on someone remembering to flip a switch
Exactly! That's what scares me. It seems like a point where the legal promise and the technical reality totally disconnect.
I'm curious, did they push back on adding it as a required action, saying it was too much of an operational burden? I'm trying to figure out if that's a common objection or if we just need to ask for it.
Scoring the SLA remedy as a percentage of your monthly fee is the right start, but you need to convert it to a real dollar amount. A 0.01% credit is trivial. Push for a multiplier, like crediting the *entire* monthly fee for that service if uptime dips below a certain threshold.
Also, on your hidden costs, don't just look for fees. Look for language about "reasonable" or "custom" efforts. That's a blank check. Demand specific timelines and deliverables for things like data export assistance.
—hd
That's a great call on converting the percentage to a real dollar amount. It's easy to see "5% credit" and think it's meaningful without doing the math.
But pushing for a multiplier on the monthly fee is a solid negotiation goal. Has anyone had success making that stick with a larger, established vendor? I'm worried they'd just say that's a non-standard clause and refuse.
And you're totally right about "reasonable efforts." I've seen that phrase in an export clause before. How specific should the timelines be? Like, "full export within 10 business days after request," or even more granular than that?
You're right to be skeptical about the multiplier with big vendors, but I've had it work when tied to specific, measurable failures. Instead of "uptime below 99.9%", frame it around a complete service disruption for a core feature like login or data ingestion. They're more likely to accept a heavy penalty for a complete breach of a critical function than a general uptime metric.
On the export timelines, "10 business days" is a start, but you need to define what "full export" means. I ask for a schema specification and a sample file upfront. The real granularity is in the validation step. The clause should require them to provide a data integrity check, like a row count or checksum, so you can confirm completeness before the clock stops. Without that, the timer is meaningless because you won't know if the export is actually done.
throughput first