Service Level Agreement

This Service Level Agreement (the “SLA”) applies to business customers with an active Order Form for the SMSBite messaging platform. It supplements, and does not replace, our Terms of Service. Where this SLA and the Terms conflict, the Terms prevail except on the specific subject of availability measurement and service credits.

This SLA sets an availability target for the SMSBite API control plane. It is a service-level objective, not a guarantee, and it is not a guarantee that any individual message will be delivered to any individual handset. Message delivery is best-effort and depends on third parties outside SMSBite’s control. Nothing in this SLA expands the warranties given in Section 12 of the Terms or the liability caps in Section 13 of the Terms.

This SLA does not apply to free trials, sandbox or test environments, proof-of-concept accounts, or features labelled beta, preview, alpha or early access.

• Service— the SMSBite platform, APIs, dashboard and related developer tooling made available under your Order Form.
• API / control plane — the HTTPS message submission endpoint and its supporting authentication and account services operated by SMSBite. This is the only component measured by this SLA.
• Submission— a single, well-formed, authenticated API request accepted by the control plane for onward routing. A Submission is complete when SMSBite returns an acceptance response; it is not a statement that the message has been or will be delivered.
• Delivery Receipt (DLR) — a status notification originating from a mobile network operator or aggregator partner and passed through by SMSBite to your configured webhook or available through the API.
• Monthly Uptime Percentage — for a calendar month, the total minutes in that month less Downtime minutes, divided by the total minutes in that month, expressed as a percentage.
• Downtime— a period in which the message submission API is unavailable to accept well-formed, authenticated Submissions, as recorded by SMSBite’s monitoring, and which is not Excluded Downtime.
• Scheduled Maintenance — planned work notified in advance in accordance with Section 06.
• Emergency Maintenance — unplanned work required to preserve the security, integrity or stability of the Service, or to comply with an operator, regulator or law-enforcement instruction.
• Excluded Downtime — any period listed in Section 06, which is not counted as Downtime.
• Service Credit — a credit calculated under Section 08 and applied against a future invoice.
• Business Day — any day other than Saturday, Sunday or a Hong Kong public holiday.
• Business Hours — 09:00 to 18:00 Hong Kong time (UTC+8) on a Business Day. A period expressed in Business Hours runs only during Business Hours.

SMSBite targets a Monthly Uptime Percentage of 99.9% for the message submission API, measured per calendar month. It applies to the control plane, is measured as set out below, and is backed by the service credits in Section 08.

Measurement method. Availability is measured by SMSBite’s own monitoring, which issues synthetic, authenticated requests against the message submission endpoint from multiple network locations at an interval of sixty (60) seconds. A check is treated as failed where the endpoint returns a server-side error or does not respond within the monitoring timeout. Consecutive failed checks are aggregated into Downtime minutes, and Downtime minutes are aggregated across the calendar month to produce the Monthly Uptime Percentage.

SMSBite’s monitoring records and request logs are the reference measurement for all purposes under this SLA, absent manifest error. Client-side measurements, third-party monitoring services and end-user reports may be submitted in support of a claim but are not determinative.

Latency. SMSBite aims to return an acceptance or rejection response to a well-formed Submission promptly, and monitors submission latency continuously. Latency is an internal operating target only. It is not warranted, it is not part of the Monthly Uptime Percentage, and it does not give rise to a Service Credit.

Once a Submission has been accepted, the message passes to mobile network operators and aggregator partners whose systems SMSBite does not own or control. The following are outside the availability measurement and do not constitute Downtime, and none of them gives rise to a Service Credit:

• Operator-side spam, content or volume filtering, including silent discard of a message that has been reported as delivered.
• Sender-ID blocking, sender-ID rewriting, or rejection of an unregistered or non-compliant sender identifier.
• Content rejection under operator policy, registry rules or destination-country pre-clearance regimes.
• Number portability lag, incorrect portability data, or routing to a former network following a port.
• Roaming conditions, inbound-roaming restrictions and international routing behaviour of the recipient network.
• A handset that is switched off, out of coverage, storage full, barred, deactivated, or otherwise unreachable; and invalid, reassigned or non-existent MSISDNs.
• Regulatory blocks, national firewalls, category bans and route suspensions imposed in a destination country.
• Outages, congestion, throttling or degradation at a mobile network operator, aggregator partner or transit provider.
• Delay, absence or inaccuracy of Delivery Receipts originating upstream.

For the avoidance of doubt, the availability commitment above applies to acceptance of Submissions. Final delivery to a handset depends on the operator conditions listed in this Section, and no delivery percentage is committed by this SLA or by any Order Form.

SMSBite routes accepted Submissions on a best-effort basis across aggregator partners and, where established, direct operator connections covering routes to mobile network operators in more than 180 countries. Where a route is unavailable, congested or returning errors, our platform attempts automatic failover to an alternative route for the same destination, where an alternative route is configured and permitted for your traffic profile. Failover is attempted, not guaranteed, and some destinations are served by a single route.

Delivery outcomes depend on the mobile network operator, aggregator partners, national regulators, number portability, roaming conditions, handset state and destination-country filtering. Route availability, operator profiles and sender-ID options may change at short notice for regulatory, commercial or risk reasons.

Delivery Receipts.A DLR is passed through to you substantially as received from the operator or aggregator. Its accuracy, timing and granularity are determined upstream. In some markets a DLR reflects only handover to the next network rather than receipt by a handset; in others, DLRs are synthesised, delayed by hours, or return a generic status. A number of destinations return no meaningful DLR at all. SMSBite does not verify, correct or warrant operator-supplied statuses, and a “delivered” status is not proof of receipt.

Charges are calculated on accepted Submissions, not on Delivery Receipts. Billing disputes are handled under the Refund & Cancellation Policy.

The following periods are Excluded Downtime and are not counted when calculating the Monthly Uptime Percentage:

• Scheduled Maintenance — notified to account contacts by email at least five (5) Business Days in advance and, save in exceptional cases, carried out inside the standard maintenance window of 18:00–22:00 UTC on Saturdays and Sundays.
• Emergency Maintenance — performed with such notice as is reasonably practicable, which may be none.
• Force majeure — events beyond SMSBite’s reasonable control, including natural disaster, war, civil unrest, epidemic, strike, cable cut, power failure, government or regulator action, and large-scale internet or denial-of-service disruption.
• Customer-caused issues — invalid or expired credentials, malformed or rejected requests, exceeding your contracted throughput, unpaid balances or credit stops, faults in your own application, network, firewall, TLS configuration or DNS resolution, and failures of any third-party integration you operate.
• Suspension— any period during which traffic, a sender ID or the account is suspended under the Acceptable Use Policy, the Anti-Spam Policy or the Terms.
• Third-party failures — outages, filtering, throttling or withdrawal of service by a mobile network operator, aggregator partner, transit provider or infrastructure supplier.
• Beta and preview features — any feature labelled beta, preview, alpha or early access, and any sandbox or test environment.

Support is provided by email to sales@smsbite.com. Staffed support hours are Business Hours as defined in Section 02. Outside those hours, P1 incidents are handled by a documented on-call rotation. SMSBite does not operate a 24/7 staffed support desk or operations centre, and does not represent otherwise.

The response times below are targets for an initial human response acknowledging the report and stating next steps. They are not resolution times, and they are not warranted.

• P1 — Critical — total failure of message submission for the account. Target initial response: two (2) hours during Business Hours, and as soon as reasonably practicable outside them via the on-call rotation.
• P2 — Degraded — submission succeeding but materially degraded, for example elevated error rates or sustained latency increases. Target initial response: four (4) Business Hours.
• P3 — Partial — a single route, destination, sender ID or non-critical function affected while the rest of the account operates normally. Target initial response: one (1) Business Day.
• P4 — Question or request — documentation questions, configuration changes, new destinations, reporting requests. Target initial response: two (2) Business Days.

SMSBite assigns the final severity, acting reasonably. A report should include the affected account, timestamps in UTC, request identifiers, destination countries and the observed error responses; incomplete reports may be triaged at a lower severity until the information is supplied. Where an incident originates with an operator or aggregator partner, SMSBite’s role is limited to escalating to that party and communicating what it is told.

Where the Monthly Uptime Percentage for the message submission API falls below the target in a calendar month, and a valid claim is made under Section 09, a Service Credit is calculated on the fees invoiced for the Service for that month as follows:

• Below 99.9% and at or above 99.5% — a credit of 5% of that month’s fees.
• Below 99.5% and at or above 99.0% — a credit of 10% of that month’s fees.
• Below 99.0%— a credit of 25% of that month’s fees.

Service Credits in respect of any month are capped at the total fees paid or payable for the Service for that month. Credits are applied against future invoices only. They are never paid in cash, never refunded, never exchanged for account balance, and they do not survive termination of the Order Form.

Service Credits are your sole and exclusive remedy, and SMSBite’s entire liability, for any failure to meet the availability target in this SLA. They do not apply to non-delivery of messages, to Delivery Receipt behaviour, to latency, or to any matter listed in Sections 04 and 06. This Section is subject to the limitation of liability in Section 13 of the Terms of Service.

Service Credits are not applied automatically. To claim, you must send a written claim to billing@smsbite.com within thirty (30) days of the end of the affected calendar month. Claims received after that period are not eligible.

A claim must include:

• The account name and the affected calendar month.
• The dates and start and end times of each period of claimed Downtime, stated in UTC.
• The identifiers of affected requests — message or request IDs, API endpoint and the HTTP status or error codes returned.
• Any supporting logs or monitoring evidence you wish to be considered.

SMSBite targets a decision within ten (10) Business Days of receiving a complete claim, and will state the Monthly Uptime Percentage recorded by its monitoring and the credit tier applied, if any. Where SMSBite’s records show the availability target was met, the claim is declined. Requests for refunds, invoice corrections and billing disputes that are not availability claims are handled under the Refund & Cancellation Policy.

A claim may only be made in respect of an account with no overdue undisputed invoices at the time of the claim.

Each account is provisioned with a contracted submission rate, expressed in messages per second and recorded in your Order Form. The availability target applies only to Submissions made within that contracted rate.

Submissions above the contracted rate may be queued briefly and released as capacity allows, or rejected with a rate-limit response, at SMSBite’s discretion. Queued Submissions are delayed, not guaranteed. Sustained excess above the contracted rate may be throttled, and repeated or prolonged excess may be treated as a customer-caused issue under Section 06, suspended, or referred for a commercial review of your contracted rate.

Separate limits apply upstream. Mobile network operators and aggregator partners impose their own per-route throughput ceilings which SMSBite cannot exceed, and a Submission accepted within your contracted rate may still be paced, queued or throttled downstream.

Throughput increases require advance notice so that upstream capacity can be arranged. Please write to sales@smsbite.com before any campaign that materially exceeds your normal volume.

SMSBite may update this SLA from time to time. Material changes — changes that reduce the availability target, reduce credit percentages, add exclusions or shorten the claim window — will be notified to account contacts by email and posted on this page at least thirty (30) days before they take effect. Non-material changes (clarifications, formatting and typographical corrections) take effect on publication.

Changes do not apply retroactively. A calendar month that is already in progress when a change takes effect is measured, and any claim for that month is assessed, under the version of this SLA in force on the first day of that month.

Where your Order Form sets different availability targets, credit tiers or support severities, the Order Form prevails over this SLA for that account.

This SLA is issued by SMS Bite Limited, trading as SMSBite, a company incorporated in Hong Kong under Company Registration N° 78685084, with its registered office at 5.17/F. Bonham Trade Centre, 50 Bonham Strand, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong.

Related policies: Terms of Service, Acceptable Use Policy, Refund & Cancellation Policy and Security.