What is an SLA credit, and how do you claim it?
A plain-English definition of SLA credits: what they are, when a vendor owes you one, how much you can claim, and the step-by-step process to get the money back.
If a SaaS or cloud vendor promises 99.99% uptime and then goes down for hours, that promise has a price. The price is called an SLA credit — and most of the money goes unclaimed because customers don't know it exists or miss the filing deadline.
The short answer
An SLA credit is a partial refund a vendor owes you when it fails to meet the uptime commitment in its Service Level Agreement (SLA). It is usually expressed as a percentage of what you paid that month for the affected service — for example, 10% of the monthly fee if uptime falls below the target, rising as the outage gets worse. Credits are almost never automatic: you have to measure the breach, file a claim with evidence before the vendor's deadline, and ask for the credit explicitly.
What an SLA actually promises
A Service Level Agreement is the contractual uptime commitment attached to a paid plan — often 99.9%, 99.95%, or 99.99% measured over a calendar month. Those numbers sound almost identical, but the downtime they permit is very different:
| Monthly uptime target | Allowed downtime per month |
|---|---|
| 99.9% ("three nines") | ~43 minutes |
| 99.95% | ~21 minutes |
| 99.99% ("four nines") | ~4 minutes |
When a vendor exceeds its allowed downtime, it has breached the SLA, and the credit clause is triggered. You can look up the exact commitment for any vendor we monitor on its SLA credit guide or check who commits to what in which SaaS vendors actually pay SLA credits.
How much is a credit worth?
Most vendors publish a tiered schedule: the further below target uptime falls, the larger the credit. A typical cloud tier table looks like this (this is AWS EC2's published structure):
| Measured monthly uptime | Credit |
|---|---|
| 99.0% – under 99.99% | 10% of spend |
| 95.0% – under 99.0% | 30% of spend |
| below 95.0% | 100% of spend |
A minority of vendors use a formula instead of tiers (Cloudflare's Enterprise SLA scales the outage ratio by a multiplier set by your success package), and some negotiate credits through your contract with no published tariff (Salesforce). The credit vs service credit explainer covers the wording differences.
How to claim an SLA credit
The process is broadly the same across vendors, though the deadline and portal differ:
- Confirm the outage window from the vendor's public status page and note the incident reference ID and exact start/end times.
- Measure your affected service's monthly uptime and find which credit tier the shortfall falls into. A credit calculator turns uptime plus monthly spend into a dollar figure.
- Gather the evidence the vendor requires — typically your account ID, the affected region or resource, and the incident timestamps.
- Open a billing or support case and request an "SLA service credit" under the availability clause of your agreement, pasting the incident reference and your credit calculation.
- File before the deadline — claim windows are short (often 30 days, sometimes 60) and start from the incident, so a late claim is worth nothing.
Why credits go unclaimed
Three reasons, all fixable: nobody was watching the vendor's status page when the outage happened; the finance owner never learned an outage occurred; or the 30-day window closed before anyone filed. This is exactly the gap Ontracko automates — it monitors each vendor's public feed, detects the breach, and assembles the claim package with the evidence attached, so filing is a formality rather than a fire drill.
Frequently asked questions
What is an SLA credit?
An SLA credit is a partial refund — usually a percentage of the affected month's fee — that a vendor owes a paying customer when it misses the uptime commitment in its Service Level Agreement. It compensates you for downtime, and in most cases you must request it with evidence before a deadline.
Are SLA credits automatic?
No. With almost every major vendor, credits are not applied automatically. You have to detect the breach, calculate the credit, and file a claim within the vendor's window (commonly 30 days) or you forfeit it.
How much SLA credit can I claim?
It depends on the vendor's schedule and how far uptime fell below target. Tiered vendors typically start at 10% of the monthly service fee and rise to 25%, 50%, or 100% for severe outages. Use a vendor-specific credit calculator to estimate your figure.
How long do I have to file an SLA credit claim?
Most vendors require the claim within 30 days of the incident; some cloud providers allow 60 days. Google Cloud's 30-day window is among the shortest of the major clouds, so act quickly.
What evidence do I need for an SLA credit claim?
Generally your account or organization ID, the affected service, region or resource, and the incident's start and end times — plus the vendor's own incident reference from its public status page, which corroborates the outage.
Methodology & caveats
The uptime-to-downtime figures above are arithmetic from the standard 30-day month; the credit tiers shown are transcribed from the named vendors' published SLAs into Ontracko's profiles — always verify the exact clause in your own agreement before filing, because credit schedules can vary by plan and region.
*Ontracko monitors SaaS & cloud vendors' public status feeds and recovers the SLA credits when they miss. Free — 8% only on recovered credits. See live reliability rankings or browse the SLA glossary.*
Related reading
Does OpenAI or Anthropic owe you an SLA credit when the API goes down?
OpenAI prints a 99.9% uptime SLA on its Scale Tier and Fast mode pages — for Enterprise customers only — but publishes no credit schedule, no uptime definition and no claim window. Anthropic publishes nothing at all and disclaims uninterrupted service by name. Here is what each one actually owes you.
Why do SLA credit claims get denied? The six exclusions that void a claim
A real outage is not the same thing as claimable downtime. Six exclusion families — plan tier, scheduled maintenance, your architecture, minimum-duration floors, third-party carve-outs and your own configuration — decide whether a vendor pays. Here is how each one works, with the vendors that use it.
DigitalOcean SLA credit: how the 99.99% Droplet guarantee pays out (and how to claim it)
DigitalOcean's CPU Droplet SLA commits to 99.99% monthly uptime per Droplet and pays a 100% service credit below it — no tiers. Here is what counts as downtime, what the credit covers, the two-billing-cycle deadline and the exact email to send.
Does Salesforce pay SLA credits? What its agreement actually commits to
Salesforce publishes no uptime percentage, no credit schedule and no filing window — its agreement promises only commercially reasonable efforts. Here is where your Salesforce SLA actually lives, and what to do after an outage.
Or browse the SLA glossary and the reliability rankings.
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