SLA breach credits
When you miss the uptime you promised, you don't just apologize — you owe money. The contract spells out a service credit: a percentage of that month's bill handed back to the customer because you let them down. The bigger the promise you sold, the harsher the refund when you break it, so a single bad outage can erase a month of revenue from an account.
The cash credit is only half the cost. A breach also dents your reputation, and your best customers — the ones on the richest plans — are the quickest to start shopping around after they've been burned. Credits are the visible bill; the slow churn of trust is the one that actually hurts.
Detailed explanation
Breach credits scale with the SLA tier the customer bought: 5% -> 10% -> 25% -> 50% of the monthly bill as you climb Bronze -> Silver -> Gold -> Platinum. Higher tiers promise more nines, so a breach against a Platinum tenant both triggers sooner (tighter allowance) and refunds harder (bigger percentage) — the downside is steeply asymmetric.
Credits don't only fire on hard downtime. Sustained breaches of a tier's p99 latency budget degrade the same SLA and feed the credit machinery, so a slow-burning noisy-neighbor or uplink-saturation problem can bleed credits without a single host ever going fully dark. Watch the tail latency, not just the uptime gauge.