API Service Levels & Enterprise SLA Policy

1. SLI, SLO, and SLA

• A service-level indicator (SLI) is the measured result, such as the fraction of eligible API requests served without a SignedOff-attributable server error.
• A service-level objective (SLO) is SignedOff’s target for an SLI. Missing a public SLO prompts reliability review but does not itself create a payment obligation.
• A service-level agreement (SLA) is a contractual commitment in a signed Enterprise order form, including any remedy, claim process, and credit cap.

2. Public Enterprise service objectives

These targets are below 100% by design. SignedOff uses the remaining error budget to manage safe maintenance and change while prioritizing reliability when a target is at risk.

3. Measurement rules

• Each objective is calculated separately for a UTC calendar month using SignedOff’s edge, application, queue, and scheduler records.
• API availability is good eligible requests / total eligible requests. A request is bad only when it receives a 5xx caused by the SignedOff application or infrastructure under SignedOff’s operational responsibility.
• Valid 2xx, 3xx, and 4xx responses are available responses. Authentication failures, validation errors, quota exhaustion, and rate limiting are not downtime.
• Hosting, database, queue, DNS, and other vendors selected to operate SignedOff remain inside the platform reliability boundary; an ordinary failure of one of those dependencies is not reclassified as a municipal-source outage.
• Webhook timing ends at the first outbound attempt. Successful receipt, processing, or response by the customer endpoint is not part of that SLI. Automatic retries remain governed by the documented webhook retry schedule.
• A watch attempt means SignedOff invoked the scheduled monitor for an eligible watch. It does not promise that the source returned a successful or changed record.
• SignedOff’s records control the calculation, subject to reasonable review of customer evidence and the signed order form.

4. Municipal-source boundary

City, county, and vendor-hosted permit portals are independent upstream sources. Portal downtime, CAPTCHA or access blocks, changed markup, delayed publication, incomplete fields, incorrect source records, and a source’s refusal or inability to answer are not SignedOff API platform downtime.

A typed 502 or 503 caused solely by an unavailable municipal source is excluded from the platform-availability SLI and tracked as source fulfillment instead. It still affects the end-to-end lookup and is not described as a successful fresh result.

SignedOff remains responsible for honest source-health reporting, bounded retries, last-known-good responses when available, and explicit freshness timestamps. See the live source-status page and coverage metadata. Neither service levels nor service credits guarantee data accuracy, completeness, official-record status, or a successful live portal response.

5. Eligibility and exclusions

Unless an Enterprise order form says otherwise, measurements exclude:

• Free, Developer, Pro, sandbox, playground, demo, beta, preview, and explicitly experimental features;
• malformed or unauthorized requests, 4xx responses, plan or rate limits, customer code, customer networks, and customer webhook receivers;
• use contrary to the API Terms, attempts to evade limits, credential compromise outside SignedOff, suspension, or nonpayment;
• municipal-source conditions described above, including source maintenance and source-imposed access controls;
• maintenance announced at least 72 hours in advance on the designated status or Enterprise communication channel, up to four hours per UTC calendar month; and
• force majeure and Internet-wide disruption outside SignedOff’s reasonable control.

Emergency maintenance is not automatically excluded merely because it was urgent. The signed order form may define a different maintenance allowance or additional covered services.

6. Signed Enterprise SLA

An Enterprise SLA applies only to the organization, live API keys, covered services, and service period identified in an executed order form. It should state the target, measurement source, exclusions, support channel, incident-notification process, credit tiers, claim deadline, and maximum monthly credit.

No SLA applies retroactively. Public pricing copy such as “signed SLA options” describes availability for negotiation and does not itself create a guarantee. Service credits are unavailable unless the order form expressly provides them and are then calculated and capped only as the order form states.

Unless the order form says otherwise, an approved service credit is the sole monetary remedy for failure to meet a contractual service level and cannot exceed the fees allocated to the affected covered service for the affected month.

7. Support and incident communication

Dedicated support does not imply 24/7 response or a fixed acknowledgment time unless the Enterprise order form names the severity definitions, contact channel, coverage hours, and response target.

Source incidents are published on the status page. Enterprise platform-incident notifications, escalation contacts, and post-incident review commitments are defined in the applicable order form. Customers should include request IDs, timestamps, affected API keys, and representative responses when reporting a suspected service-level event.