Multi-AZ Cost Calculator
Estimate multi-AZ deployment costs including redundant instances, cross-AZ data transfer, and load balancers. Plan high-availability architectures.
SLA Penalty Calculator
Calculate SLA penalty credits based on uptime percentages and service level tiers. Estimate cloud provider credit amounts for missed SLA targets.
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SLA Breached?⧉
Yes
Breach Tier⧉
Tier 1 (< 99.95%)
Credit Percentage⧉
10%
Credit Amount⧉
$500.00
Downtime⧉
216.0 min
Based on 30-day month
Planning notes, formulas, and examples
About the SLA Penalty Calculator
Cloud providers offer Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that guarantee minimum uptime percentages. When they fail to meet these commitments, you're entitled to service credits as compensation. Understanding how SLA credits are calculated helps you assess the financial protection your SLA provides and negotiate better terms.
SLA credit tiers typically escalate with severity: a minor breach (e.g., 99.9% vs 99.95%) might yield a 10% credit, while a major outage (below 99%) could trigger a 30–50% credit on the affected service's monthly fee. These credits are applied to future bills, not refunded in cash.
This calculator helps you determine the credit amount you're owed based on actual uptime, your SLA tier thresholds, and the monthly fee for the affected service. Use it to quantify outage impacts and evaluate whether your SLA provides adequate financial protection.
When This Page Helps
Most teams don't claim SLA credits because they don't track uptime closely or find the claims process tedious. This calculator quantifies exactly how much credit you're owed, making it easy to file claims. For large cloud bills, even a 10% credit on an affected service can mean thousands of dollars back on your account.
How to Use the Inputs
- Enter the monthly fee for the service that experienced downtime.
- Enter the actual uptime percentage achieved during the billing period.
- Set your SLA guarantee percentage (e.g., 99.95%).
- Enter the credit percentage for the first SLA breach tier.
- Set a lower uptime threshold and higher credit percentage for severe breaches.
- Review the credit amount and compare against your actual service fee.
Formula used
If actual_uptime < sla_target:
If actual_uptime ≥ tier1_threshold: credit = fee × tier1_credit_%
If actual_uptime ≥ tier2_threshold: credit = fee × tier2_credit_%
If actual_uptime < tier2_threshold: credit = fee × tier3_credit_%Example Calculation
Result: $500 service credit (10%)
With a $5,000 monthly service fee and actual uptime of 99.5% against a 99.95% SLA, uptime falls in the first breach tier (99.0–99.95%). A 10% credit applies, yielding a $500 credit on next month's bill.
Tips & Best Practices
- Always file SLA credit claims promptly — most providers require claims within 30 days.
- Track uptime independently using third-party monitoring (e.g., Datadog, Pingdom).
- SLA credits are typically capped at the monthly fee for the affected service.
- Credits don't cover indirect losses like lost revenue or reputation damage.
- Review SLA terms before signing — some exclude scheduled maintenance windows.
- Negotiate higher credit percentages in enterprise agreements for critical workloads.
Understanding Cloud SLA Structures
Cloud SLAs are per-service, not per-account. Each service (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda) has its own SLA with different uptime guarantees and credit tiers. Multi-AZ deployments often qualify for higher SLA guarantees than single-AZ. Understanding which services have which SLAs helps you architect for the availability you need.
Calculating Actual Uptime
Uptime percentage = (total_minutes − downtime_minutes) / total_minutes × 100. A month has approximately 43,200 minutes (30 days). Track uptime using your own monitoring tools rather than relying solely on cloud provider status pages, which may not reflect your specific experience.
Beyond SLA Credits: Real Downtime Costs
The true cost of downtime far exceeds SLA credits. Revenue loss, customer churn, SLA breaches with your own customers, and emergency response costs dwarf the 10–30% service credit. Invest in redundancy, multi-AZ, and automated failover to prevent outages rather than relying on credits after the fact.
Sources & Methodology
Last updated:
Frequently Asked Questions
SLA credits are typically applied as a credit to your next monthly bill, not as a cash refund. You usually need to file a support ticket requesting the credit within 30 days of the incident.
99.95% uptime allows approximately 21.9 minutes of downtime per month or 4.38 hours per year. 99.99% allows 4.38 minutes per month. 99.9% allows 43.8 minutes per month.
No. SLA credits compensate only for the service fee, not for lost revenue, data loss, or reputation damage. For critical workloads, consider separate business interruption insurance and disaster recovery investments.
AWS EC2 offers 10% credit for <99.99%, 25% for <99.0%, and 100% for <95%. Azure VMs offer 10% for <99.99%, 25% for <99%, and a full credit for <95%. GCP Compute offers 10–50% depending on severity.
Enterprise customers can often negotiate higher credit percentages, shorter response times, and custom SLA terms as part of their enterprise agreement. Spending commitments give you leverage in these negotiations.
SLA definitions vary by service. For AWS EC2, unavailability means when all running instances in a region have no external connectivity. Partial degradation may not qualify. Always read the specific SLA document for each service.
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