A two-day outage was forgivable. The missing refund was not.

A critical work app went down for almost two full days, and the customer says the outage is not what it will remember. A SaaStr post says the vendor never offered a service-level credit, which is a small refund for downtime. It did not come during the outage, after it, or in the postmortem email, the write-up explaining what went wrong.

What happened

Work stopped. The team built workarounds in spreadsheets. Someone asked for an update every few hours. The author says outages are part of running a software company and that he has been on the vendor side of one. He adds that a patch broke a core workflow, not the whole app, and it was not down for everyone.

The math

The author runs the numbers on a typical mid-market contract of $60,000 a year. That is the price tag the credit is measured against.

• About $165 a day, so two days down is roughly $330.
• A full week credited would be about $1,150.
• A full month credited would be $5,000, against a $60,000 renewal.

The author says that is less than one field marketing dinner. He also says the point is not the money. A credit tells the customer the vendor knows it hurt and took responsibility without being asked.

Why silence costs more

After an outage, the customer can dig up the contract, file a ticket or email the sales rep, and many feel petty doing it. Most will not. They quietly note it. The author says that note can resurface nine months later, when someone suggests looking at alternatives and nobody pushes back.

The person who chose the vendor is hit hardest. At renewal, that champion has to defend a vendor that had a two-day outage and offered nothing. The author says vendors who skip a $330 credit often spend 10 to 100 times that later on save campaigns, renewal discounts and executive escalations.

What to do

For buyers of systems a business runs on, such as customer records, billing or accounting software, the author says to ask about outages during contract review:

• Who declares an outage?
• How long before credits kick in?
• Are credits automatic, or must the customer claim them?
• Where is it written down?

For vendors, the author suggests one email within 24 hours: a credit, an honest explanation and a thank you. He also suggests linking uptime monitoring to billing so credits go out automatically when a threshold is crossed.