Service Level Agreement

1. Who this covers#

In short: Every paid plan, from your first payment. Free accounts are not covered.

The commitment in section 2 applies to every paid plan, from the month your first payment is taken. It is not conditional on the beta ending, and it is not reduced because a plan is discounted during the beta.

Free accounts are not covered and carry no uptime commitment or service credits. That is deliberate rather than mean: a free account exists so you can find out whether this works for you, and we would rather be plain that it is not the thing to put a heating system on than imply a promise we are not making. Move to a paid plan and the commitment applies from that month.

2. The commitment#

In short: 99.5 percent of the minutes in a month, which allows three hours thirty-nine minutes down.

We commit to a monthly uptime of at least 99.5 percent for the broker connection service on paid plans. That allows for three hours and thirty-nine minutes of unavailability in a 30 day month.

Unavailability means the broker is not accepting MQTT connections on its published ports. It is measured across a calendar month, in whole minutes, and rounded in your favour.

Being straight about the number, because you can compare it to bigger suppliers advertising 99.9 or 99.95: AyaiMQ runs on a single broker today with no standby to fail over to. 99.5 percent is what that can honestly carry, and we would rather commit to a figure we beat than publish one we breach. When a standby is in place this number goes up, and we will tell you when that happens rather than quietly leaving the old one here.

3. How it is measured#

In short: The console checks every five minutes and keeps the record. Ask for any month and we will send you what it says.

The broker reports its health to the console every five minutes. Separately, and whatever the broker is doing, the console checks every five minutes whether that report arrived and whether it said the service was healthy, and records the answer. Availability for a month is the proportion of those five minute checks that came back healthy.

The check runs in the console rather than on the broker on purpose. A machine that has failed cannot report that it has failed, so if the broker kept its own record an outage would show up as missing rows, which look identical to a recorder that was never switched on. Doing it the other way round means a dead broker actively produces evidence that it was dead.

You can ask for the figure for any month and we will send you what the record says, including the months we did badly. A commitment nobody can check is a slogan, and the reason we can offer this one is that the measurement was built before the promise.

If our own measurement disagrees with yours, tell us. Where the disagreement is genuine we will take the worse of the two.

4. Service credits#

In short: Miss it and you get 10, 25 or 50 percent of the month back depending on how badly. Ask within 30 days.

If we miss the commitment in a calendar month, you can claim a credit against that month's fee:

• Below 99.5 percent: 10 percent of the monthly fee for the affected plan.
• Below 99.0 percent: 25 percent.
• Below 95.0 percent: 50 percent.

Credits are applied against future invoices and are the only remedy this agreement provides for missed availability. They do not affect your right to cancel, which you can do at any time from the billing page.

To claim, write to support@logicboks.com within 30 days of the end of the month concerned, saying which month it was. We will check the record and apply the credit if the commitment was missed. You do not have to prove the outage, only ask.

5. Planned maintenance#

In short: 48 hours notice, out of hours, and never more than four hours a month.

Planned maintenance is excluded from the calculation, and it is bounded so that the exclusion cannot swallow the commitment:

• At least 48 hours notice by email, to the address on the account.
• Outside 06:00 to 20:00 UK time on weekdays, because that is when the buildings we serve are occupied.
• No more than 4 hours in any calendar month.

Emergency maintenance to address a security issue may happen without notice. We will tell you what it was afterwards, and it counts as downtime rather than being excluded.

6. What is excluded, and what deliberately is not#

In short: Your own network is excluded. Our hosting provider is not, because we chose them and you did not.

The commitment does not apply to downtime caused by:

• Planned maintenance meeting the conditions in section 5.
• Your own equipment, network, software, credentials or configuration.
• Your internet connection, or the public internet between you and us.
• Suspension for breach of the Terms or the Acceptable Use Policy.
• Anything genuinely beyond our reasonable control, meaning events rather than suppliers: war, natural disaster, national infrastructure failure.

Our own suppliers are NOT excluded, and that is a deliberate difference from most agreements you will read. If the hosting company we chose has an outage, or the database or network provider we chose does, that is our outage and it counts against this commitment. We picked them; you did not. An agreement that excludes every supplier is one that can never be breached, which makes it decoration.

7. Support#

In short: Email, one working day on paid plans and usually the same one.

Support is by email at support@logicboks.com. On paid plans we will respond within one working day and usually the same one. On free accounts we answer when we can, and usually quickly, but there is no committed response time.

This is a small company and support is a person rather than a queue, which is why the response times are modest and real. If something is actually down, say so in the subject line and it goes to the top.

8. Incidents#

In short: We are alerted automatically, so we usually know before you do, and we tell you what happened.

We monitor the broker automatically and are alerted when it stops responding, so in most cases we know before you do. For any incident that causes unavailability on a paid plan we will tell you what happened and what we changed so it does not happen again.

We do not yet run a public status page. Until we do, incident notices go by email to the address on the account.

9. Changes#

In short: Thirty days notice if we ever reduce the commitment, and you can leave.

If we change this agreement in a way that reduces the commitment, we will give you 30 days notice and you can cancel before it takes effect. Increases to the commitment take effect immediately, because there is nothing to object to.