Service Level Agreement
The operational commitment HIBR makes to every paying customer, by tier. This is the document we'll sign and enforce — not marketing language. Effective for all paid subscriptions starting from production launch (October 2026).
1. Uptime commitment per tier
HIBR commits to the following monthly uptime percentages, measured per calendar month and per component group:
| | Lite — 199/mo | Pro — 499/mo | Enterprise — 14,990/yr |
|---|
| Monthly uptime guarantee | 99.5% | 99.9% | 99.95% |
| Maximum allowed downtime per month | 3 hours 38 min | 43 min 49 sec | 21 min 54 sec |
| Maximum service credit per month | 10% | 25% | 50% |
| Critical FTA-window protection | Best-effort | Guaranteed | Guaranteed + dedicated standby |
The uptime guarantee applies to the HIBR Web Application (app.hibr.ai) and the HIBR API (api.hibr.ai). Bank feeds, AI Tax Co-pilot, and third-party integrations have separate availability targets — see §5 for details.
FTA-window protection
The five business days leading up to each FTA filing deadline (VAT 201 and CT-201 cut-off dates) are designated "critical filing windows." During these windows:
- Lite: Standard SLA applies. Best-effort prioritization.
- Pro: Guaranteed escalation. Any SEV-1 / SEV-2 during a critical window automatically triggers our engineering standby team within 15 minutes.
- Enterprise: Dedicated standby engineer assigned to your account during the window. Direct phone line + WhatsApp channel.
2. How we measure uptime
Uptime is measured by independent third-party monitoring (Pingdom + StatusCake) running synthetic checks every 60 seconds from at least 3 geographic regions, including one inside the UAE. The full methodology:
- What counts as "up": The monitored endpoint returns HTTP 200 within 5 seconds of the request, with the expected response body fingerprint.
- What counts as "down": Two or more consecutive failed checks from two or more regions. A single regional failure (e.g., one ISP routing issue) does not count.
- Measurement period: Each calendar month, midnight UTC to midnight UTC.
- Calculation: Total minutes up ÷ Total minutes in month × 100. Rounded to 3 decimal places.
- Public dashboard: All measurements published live at /erp/status/ from production launch.
We do not get to mark our own homework. Synthetic checks run on infrastructure we don't control (Pingdom and StatusCake are independent services). Our raw uptime numbers come from their dashboards, not ours. This is deliberate — we want a customer who claims a credit to be able to verify our published numbers against a third party.
3. Support response times per tier
Support response time = time from ticket submission (or chat opening) to first substantive reply from a HIBR engineer or specialist. Not auto-acknowledgement.
| Severity | Lite | Pro | Enterprise |
|---|
| SEV-1 (Critical, production down) | 4 hours | 1 hour | 15 minutes |
| SEV-2 (Major function impaired) | 8 business hours | 2 hours | 30 minutes |
| SEV-3 (Minor, workaround available) | 1 business day | 4 business hours | 2 business hours |
| SEV-4 (Cosmetic, low impact) | 3 business days | 1 business day | 4 business hours |
| Support channels | Email + in-app chat | Email + in-app + WhatsApp | Email + in-app + WhatsApp + dedicated phone line |
| Business hours | 9am–6pm UAE, Sun–Thu | 8am–8pm UAE, 7 days | 24×7 for SEV-1/SEV-2 |
4. Service credits — what you get when we miss
If HIBR fails to meet the uptime guarantee in a calendar month, you are eligible for a service credit calculated as a percentage of your monthly subscription fee. Credits accumulate up to the maximum per-month cap shown in §1.
| Actual monthly uptime | Lite credit | Pro credit | Enterprise credit |
|---|
| 99.5% – 99.0% | 10% | 10% | 10% |
| 98.99% – 95.0% | 10% (max) | 25% | 25% |
| Below 95.0% | 10% (max) | 25% (max) | 50% |
Service credits apply as a discount on your next invoice. They are not cashed out as a refund except where required by UAE consumer protection law. If your account is on annual prepay, credits extend your subscription term proportionally.
5. Exclusions — what doesn't count as downtime
The following events do not count against the uptime guarantee:
- Scheduled maintenance published at least 72 hours in advance. We commit to keeping scheduled maintenance under 4 hours per month and outside business hours.
- Force majeure — natural disasters, governmental actions, war, civil unrest, AWS regional outages affecting all customers in me-central-1 (Bahrain).
- Customer-side issues — outages of the customer's own internet connection, DNS misconfiguration on customer's domain, or actions by the customer's authorized users (e.g., locking their own account).
- Third-party dependency outages — when a bank feed, payment gateway, FTA EmaraTax portal, or PEPPOL service provider is unavailable and HIBR has no alternative path. We document third-party impact separately on the status page but do not count it against HIBR's own uptime number.
- Beta features — features explicitly labeled "Beta" in the product UI are excluded from the SLA. Beta features remain free to use but carry no uptime commitment.
- Free trial / unpaid accounts — the SLA applies only to active paid subscriptions.
Component-specific availability targets
Some components have intrinsic dependency on external services and therefore have separate availability targets:
- Bank feeds: 95% — depends on UAE bank APIs which have their own maintenance windows. Loss of bank feed doesn't prevent manual statement import.
- FTA EmaraTax integration: Best-effort, mirrors FTA's own uptime. When FTA is down, our submission queue holds returns until FTA is back.
- AI Tax Co-pilot: 98% — Arabic and English LLM inference, with fallback model rotation.
- PEPPOL PINT-AE invoice submission: 99% — through our accredited service provider.
6. How to claim credits
Service credits are not automatic. To claim:
- Email sla-claims@hibr.ai within 30 days of the end of the affected calendar month.
- Reference the dates and incident IDs from the public status page that you believe affected your account.
- State your account email and which tier was active during the affected period.
HIBR responds within 5 business days with either credit confirmation or an explanation of why the claim was declined (referencing the specific exclusion that applied). Declined claims can be escalated to legal@hibr.ai.
Why isn't credit automatic? Because some downtime is account-specific (e.g., your account locked, your IP blocked, your bank disconnected) and doesn't show up on the global status dashboard. A claim flow lets us review whether your account actually was affected by the global incident, or whether something account-specific was happening. Most legitimate claims are approved within 24 hours.
7. Backup & data retention commitments
Independent of uptime, HIBR commits to the following data protection standards:
- Backup frequency: Continuous transaction-log shipping + full daily snapshots
- Backup retention: 30 days of point-in-time recovery; 12 months of monthly snapshots; 7 years of statutory archives for VAT and Corporate Tax records (per FTA Decision 2/2019)
- Backup location: Encrypted at rest, replicated to a second AWS Availability Zone within me-central-1 (Bahrain region). No data leaves UAE/GCC region under any circumstance — see data residency.
- Restore time objective (RTO): 4 hours for full production restore from latest backup
- Restore point objective (RPO): 15 minutes (maximum data loss in a disaster scenario)
- Restore testing: Monthly restore drills, with results published in the quarterly Trust Report
- Customer data export: Available 24/7 in CSV, JSON, and PDF formats. Full database export available within 24 hours of request.
- Account termination: Data retained for 90 days after subscription cancellation (recoverable). Permanently deleted on day 91 unless retention is extended by request.
8. Changes to this SLA
HIBR may revise this SLA. When we do:
- The current version is always live at this URL with a clear "Last updated" date
- Any changes that reduce a commitment require 60 days advance notice to all paying customers via email
- Any changes that improve a commitment take effect immediately and are announced
- Historical versions of this SLA are preserved in our legal archive repository (Github, public) so a customer can always verify what was in effect when they signed
Pre-launch note: This SLA takes effect on the production launch date (October 2026). Beta participants get a separate, lighter-weight SLA documented in their beta agreement. The version of the public SLA in effect on your subscription start date is the version that applies to your account for the first 12 months — even if we later publish an updated SLA.
Questions about the SLA?
For specific contractual requirements, custom uptime targets, or enterprise procurement, email contracts@hibr.ai or reserve a beta seat to discuss.
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