Service Level Agreement

1. Overview

This Service Level Agreement ("SLA") defines the service commitments provided by Find a Contract Ltd ("we", "us", or "our") to subscribing organisations ("you") for the Find a Contract platform ("Service"). This SLA forms part of the Terms and Conditions and applies to all paid subscription plans.

The SLA does not apply during the 7-day free trial period, though we aim to provide the same level of service to trial users.

2. Uptime Commitment

We commit to maintaining a platform availability of 99.5% measured on a monthly basis, calculated as the total minutes in the calendar month minus downtime minutes, divided by total minutes in the month. This commitment covers the core platform functionality, including contract search, pipeline management, watchlist, and dashboard features.

Uptime is measured by our monitoring infrastructure, which checks platform availability at regular intervals from multiple geographic locations. Partial degradation of non-critical features (such as delayed AI brief generation) does not constitute downtime for the purposes of this SLA.

The following are excluded from uptime calculations:

• Scheduled maintenance windows (as defined in Section 3).
• Downtime caused by factors outside our reasonable control, including internet outages, DNS failures, or force majeure events.
• Issues caused by your equipment, software, network connections, or third-party services not under our control.
• Downtime resulting from actions taken at your request or from your violation of the Terms and Conditions.

3. Scheduled Maintenance

We perform scheduled maintenance to deploy updates, apply security patches, and optimise platform performance. Scheduled maintenance is conducted during low-usage periods, typically between 02:00 and 06:00 UTC on weekdays.

We will provide at least 48 hours' advance notice for planned maintenance that may affect platform availability, communicated via email to organisation administrators. Emergency maintenance required to address critical security vulnerabilities or data integrity issues may be performed with shorter notice.

We aim to complete scheduled maintenance within 30 minutes. If maintenance is expected to exceed this duration, we will provide an estimated completion time in the maintenance notification.

4. Data Freshness

The Service ingests contract opportunity data from two UK government sources: Contracts Finder (contractsfinder.service.gov.uk) and Find a Tender (find-tender.service.gov.uk). Data ingestion is performed daily at 06:00 UTC via automated processes.

We commit to the following data freshness targets:

• Contract data: Updated within 24 hours of publication on the source government platforms, under normal operating conditions.
• AI analysis cache: Contract briefs and match analyses are cached for 24 hours and regenerated on demand.
• Notifications and alerts: Instant alerts dispatched within 15 minutes of data ingestion for matching contracts. Daily digests sent at 08:00 UTC; weekly digests sent Monday at 08:00 UTC.

Data freshness is subject to the availability and timeliness of the upstream government APIs. Delays or outages in government data sources are outside our control and are not covered by this SLA. The DataFreshness indicator on contract, buyer, and competitor detail pages shows when data was last updated.

5. Support Response Times

We provide email support at support@findacontract.co.uk. Support is available Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:30 GMT/BST, excluding UK bank holidays. We aim to respond to all support requests within the following timeframes based on severity:

• Critical (P1): Platform-wide outage or data breach affecting all users. Initial response within 4 hours. Updates every 2 hours until resolved. Target resolution: 8 hours.
• High (P2): Major feature unavailable (e.g., contract search, pipeline, or AI analysis not functioning) affecting multiple users. Initial response within 24 hours. Target resolution: 48 hours.
• Standard (P3): Minor feature issues, display errors, or individual user problems that do not prevent core platform use. Initial response within 48 hours. Target resolution: 5 business days.
• Low (P4): Feature requests, general questions, and non-urgent enquiries. Initial response within 5 business days.

Response times are measured during business hours only. Requests submitted outside business hours will be addressed on the next business day, except for P1 incidents which are monitored continuously.

6. Incident Classification

We classify service incidents based on their impact on platform availability and user experience:

• Major incident: Complete loss of platform availability affecting all users, or a confirmed data breach. Triggers P1 response protocol and incident management procedures.
• Significant incident: Loss of a core feature (search, pipeline, dashboard) or degraded performance affecting a significant portion of users. Triggers P2 response protocol.
• Minor incident: Localised issue affecting a small number of users or a non-critical feature. Handled through standard support channels.

For major and significant incidents, we will publish status updates through our support email channel. A post-incident report will be provided within 5 business days of resolution for major incidents, including root cause analysis and preventive measures.

7. Service Credits

If we fail to meet the 99.5% monthly uptime commitment, you may be eligible for service credits as follows:

• 99.0% to 99.4% uptime: Credit of 10% of the monthly subscription fee for the affected month.
• 95.0% to 98.9% uptime: Credit of 25% of the monthly subscription fee for the affected month.
• Below 95.0% uptime: Credit of 50% of the monthly subscription fee for the affected month.

To claim a service credit, you must submit a request to support@findacontract.co.uk within 30 days of the end of the affected month, including details of the downtime experienced. Service credits will be applied to your next billing period and are not redeemable for cash.

The maximum total service credit for any single month shall not exceed 50% of the monthly subscription fee. Service credits are your sole and exclusive remedy for any failure to meet the uptime commitment.

8. Exclusions

This SLA does not apply to:

• Free trial accounts (though we aim to provide equivalent service levels).
• Features explicitly labelled as "beta" or "experimental".
• Third-party service availability, including Stripe payment processing, upstream government API availability, and AI provider (Anthropic) response times.
• Performance degradation caused by excessive usage that violates the Acceptable Use Policy.
• Force majeure events, including natural disasters, pandemics, government actions, war, terrorism, and widespread internet or infrastructure failures.

9. Monitoring

We continuously monitor platform health, including application availability, API response times, database performance, and background job execution (data ingestion, alert dispatching, digest emails). Automated alerts notify our engineering team of any anomalies or threshold breaches.

Pipeline deadline checks run daily at 07:00 UTC to identify and flag overdue items. Alert digests are dispatched on schedule (daily at 08:00 UTC, weekly on Mondays at 08:00 UTC). Any failures in these automated processes are detected and addressed within the support response timeframes defined in this SLA.

10. Changes to This SLA

We may update this SLA from time to time. Any changes that reduce the commitments in this SLA will be communicated to all active subscribers at least 30 days before they take effect. Improvements to service levels may be implemented immediately.

11. Contact

For questions about this SLA or to report a service issue, please contact us at support@findacontract.co.uk.

Find a Contract Ltd
Registered in England and Wales
Website: findacontract.co.uk