Table of Contents
1. Service Availability Target
Braille Link commits to maintaining a monthly service availability of at least 99.5% for all paid plan subscribers. This means that in any given calendar month, the total unplanned downtime shall not exceed approximately 3 hours and 40 minutes.
1.1 What "Available" Means
The Service is considered "available" when users can successfully authenticate, submit translation requests, and receive responses via the standard web interface and/or API. Degraded performance (slower-than-normal response times) without complete outage does not constitute unavailability for the purposes of this SLA.
1.2 Monthly Availability Targets by Plan
- Institution Annual Plan: 99.5% monthly uptime — SLA applies, service credits available.
- Personal Annual Plan: 99.5% monthly uptime — SLA applies, service credits available.
- Personal Monthly Plan: Best-efforts availability — no formal SLA credit commitment.
- Free Trial / Free Tier: No SLA commitment.
2. Scheduled Maintenance
Planned maintenance windows are excluded from uptime calculations. Braille Link will provide at least 24 hours advance notice of any scheduled maintenance that is expected to cause service interruption.
2.1 Notification
Maintenance notices will be displayed as a prominent in-platform notice banner visible to all users upon login. For institutional accounts, the Institution Administrator will be notified directly and is responsible for informing their users in advance. Email notification may be provided where feasible but is not guaranteed for every maintenance event.
2.2 Maintenance Windows
Scheduled maintenance is typically performed during low-usage periods (weeknights and weekends, East Africa Time). We aim to limit any individual maintenance window to a maximum of 4 hours. Maintenance that overruns the notified window will be treated as unplanned downtime for the excess duration.
2.3 Emergency Maintenance
In rare circumstances, emergency security patches or critical infrastructure repairs may require unscheduled maintenance with less than 24 hours' notice. We will notify affected users as quickly as possible and provide updates throughout the maintenance period. Emergency maintenance is counted as scheduled maintenance and excluded from SLA downtime calculations only if it is necessary to prevent a security breach or data loss.
3. Incident Response Times
Braille Link classifies incidents by severity and commits to the following initial response and resolution target times:
Critical — Platform Completely Unavailable
The Service is entirely inaccessible to all users or all translation requests are failing.
- Initial response: Within 2 hours of incident detection or report.
- Resolution target: Best-efforts resolution within 4 hours; updates every 30 minutes.
High — Major Feature Unavailable
A core feature (e.g., image translation, document export, or authentication) is completely broken, but the rest of the platform is accessible.
- Initial response: Within 8 hours of incident detection or report.
- Resolution target: Best-efforts resolution within 24 hours; updates every 2 hours.
Medium — Partial Feature Degradation
A feature is functioning but with significant performance degradation, intermittent errors, or reduced accuracy that impairs normal use.
- Initial response: Within 24 hours of incident detection or report.
- Resolution target: Best-efforts resolution within 72 hours; daily updates.
Low — Minor Issues or Cosmetic Defects
Minor bugs, cosmetic issues, or edge-case errors that do not significantly impair normal platform use.
- Initial response: Within 72 hours of incident detection or report.
- Resolution target: Addressed in a scheduled release; no guaranteed timeline.
4. Uptime Calculation
Monthly uptime percentage is calculated as follows:
Uptime % = ((Total minutes in month − Unplanned downtime minutes) / Total minutes in month) × 100
The following are excluded from downtime calculations:
- Scheduled maintenance windows (with at least 24 hours' notice).
- Downtime caused by force majeure events (see Section 6).
- Downtime caused by the customer's own actions, including misuse or invalid API calls that trigger protective rate-limiting.
- Downtime caused by third-party services outside Braille Link's control (e.g., payment processors, external vision service).
- Periods of degraded performance that do not constitute complete unavailability.
Uptime data is derived from availability records reported by our cloud infrastructure provider (Render). Availability reports for institutional subscribers are compiled from provider-reported data and made available upon written request.
5. Service Credits
If the monthly uptime falls below the 99.5% SLA target due to unplanned downtime attributable to Braille Link, eligible subscribers may claim a service credit. Credits are calculated manually by our team upon a verified credit request and applied to future invoices.
- For each 1% (or fraction thereof) that uptime falls below 99.5%, a credit of 10% of the monthly subscription fee (pro-rated for annual plans) will be calculated and applied.
- The maximum total credit for any single calendar month is 30% of that month's subscription fee.
- Credits are applied as a reduction against future invoices and are not redeemable as cash.
- Credits expire 12 months after issuance if not applied to an invoice.
5.1 How to Claim Credits
To request a service credit, submit a written request to support@tusomebraille.com within 30 days of the end of the affected calendar month. Include your account email, the dates and duration of the outage(s), and a description of the impact. We will manually verify the downtime against our infrastructure provider records and respond within 10 business days.
5.2 Credit as Sole Remedy
Service credits described in this SLA are your sole and exclusive remedy for service unavailability. Credits do not affect the limitation of liability provisions in the Terms of Service.
6. Exclusions
This SLA does not apply, and no service credits will be issued, for downtime or degraded performance caused by:
6.1 Force Majeure
Events beyond Braille Link's reasonable control, including but not limited to: acts of God, natural disasters, floods, fires, earthquakes, epidemics, war, terrorism, civil unrest, labour disputes, governmental actions, internet backbone failures, or widespread power outages affecting data centre infrastructure.
6.2 User Error
Outages or service degradation caused by the subscriber's own actions, including misconfigured API integrations, exceeding rate limits through bulk requests, submitting malformed inputs, or actions that trigger automated security controls.
6.3 Third-Party Services
Failures in third-party systems that Braille Link relies upon but does not control, including: cloud infrastructure providers, the external Python vision service (YOLO), payment processors, DNS providers, and internet service providers.
6.4 Scheduled Maintenance
Maintenance windows communicated at least 24 hours in advance, as described in Section 2.
6.5 Free Tier and Trial Accounts
Accounts on free trials or free-tier plans are not covered by this SLA.
7. Reporting
During a known outage or maintenance period, a notice is displayed within the platform. Users experiencing issues are encouraged to contact support before assuming a full platform outage.
Institutional subscribers may request an availability report by contacting support@tusomebraille.com. Reports are compiled from our infrastructure provider's availability data, issued within 10 business days of request, and cover the preceding calendar month.
To report an outage or service degradation, contact us at the support channels listed in Section 8. Please include a description of the issue, when it started, which features are affected, and any error messages you have observed.
8. Support Channels
Braille Link provides the following support channels for subscribers:
- Email Support: support@tusomebraille.com — for general enquiries, incident reports, and credit requests. Response within 2 business days for paid plans.
- Billing Support: admin@tusomebraille.com — for payment issues, invoices, and credit note requests.
- Security Issues: support@tusomebraille.com — for reporting security vulnerabilities or suspected breaches.
- Institution Onboarding: Institutional clients have access to a dedicated onboarding contact during the setup period. Contact details are provided in the institutional welcome package.
Support is available Monday–Friday, 8:00 AM–6:00 PM EAT. Critical incidents are monitored 24/7 and will receive an initial response within the timeframes specified in Section 3, even outside standard business hours.