Service Level Agreement
Last updated: 13 August 2026 · Version: 2026-08-13
This annex is the uptime commitment referred to in clause 7.1 of the Merchant and API Terms. It applies to businesses on a paid ThumaTrade plan. It is not signed separately — accepting the Merchant Terms takes it with them.
You do not have to claim. Where a month falls below the target, the credit is worked out and paid into your ThumaPay balance automatically. Nothing in this document requires you to notice, write in, or ask.
1. What is promised
| Plan | Availability, per calendar month | First response to a support message |
|---|---|---|
| Counter (free) | Best effort — no committed figure | No committed time |
| Depot | 99.5% | 1 working day |
| Network | 99.9% | 4 working hours |
Counter is not a lesser platform. It is the same service, the same people and the same status page. What it does not carry is a service credit, because a share of a fee of nothing is nothing, and we would rather say so than print a zero at you after a bad day.
2. What "available" means
Available means you can place and dispatch orders. Two things are measured:
- Booking and the app — placing an order, the driver app, the merchant
portal.
- Finding a driver — offers going out and being accepted.
Nothing else consumes the availability budget. Tracking pages, notifications and card payments each have their own line on the status page, and an outage there is disclosed, but it does not stop you trading and it is not what this figure is about.
3. How the figure is worked out
3.1. From the incidents we ourselves published on the status page while they were happening, at status.thumaexpress.com. Every minute counted against a month is a minute that was public at the time. We do not restate a month afterwards.
3.2. Only a full outage counts. A period we marked degraded — slow, but working — is disclosed and does not consume the budget, because a slow minute and a dead minute are not the same thing.
3.3. Overlapping outages are counted once. Two components down together is one bad ten minutes for you, not twenty.
3.4. Availability is (minutes in the month − outage minutes) ÷ minutes in the month, rounded down to two decimal places. Rounding down is deliberate: 99.899% is not 99.9%, and the one place a rounding convention must not favour us is the one that decides whether we owe you money.
4. What is not counted
- Planned maintenance, announced on the status page at least 48 hours
ahead and run outside 07:00–20:00 local time.
- Anything caused by your own network, device or systems, including an
integration of yours that stopped sending us valid requests.
- A third party we do not control — a mobile money rail, a card network, a
bank, or a national outage of internet or electricity. We will say so on the status page and help you work around it; we cannot promise somebody else's uptime.
- Force majeure, as defined in the General Terms.
- Suspension for non-payment or for a breach of the Terms, on notice.
5. The credit
Where a calendar month falls below the target for your plan:
| That month's availability | Credit |
|---|---|
| Below target, at least 99.0% | 10% of that month's plan fee |
| Below 99.0%, at least 95.0% | 25% of that month's plan fee |
| Below 95.0% | 50% of that month's plan fee |
5.1. The credit is a share of the plan fee for that month, in the currency your plan is priced in. Delivery charges are not part of it.
5.2. It is paid into your ThumaPay balance, normally within the first week of the following month, and it can be spent on deliveries like any other balance. It is not withdrawable as cash and it is not a refund of a payment.
5.3. Credits in a month are capped at 50% of that month's fee, which is the worst step of the ladder above rather than a separate limit.
5.4. Credits are the sole remedy for missed availability under this annex. Nothing here limits a right you have under the Carriage of Goods annex for a particular consignment, or any liability that cannot lawfully be limited.
6. Support response
6.1. The response times in clause 1 are for a first human response to a message raised through the app or the portal, in working hours: 08:00–17:00 local time, Monday to Friday, excluding public holidays.
6.2. A first response is somebody reading it and answering, not an acknowledgement generated by a machine.
6.3. A missed response time does not itself carry a credit. If it becomes a pattern, take it up with us — that is a conversation about the account, not an arithmetic exercise.
7. What this does not cover
Delivery performance is not in this document. Whether a particular parcel arrived inside its promised window is dealt with on that parcel, under the Carriage of Goods annex and any cover purchased — not by a percentage at the end of the month. Folding the two together would produce a number that says nothing useful about either.
8. Seeing the numbers
8.1. The current month, the target for your plan and every credit raised are on the Trust screen of the merchant portal.
8.2. Live and historical incidents are public at status.thumaexpress.com, including for people who cannot sign in — which is the situation the page exists for.
9. Changes
We may change this annex on 30 days' notice for a change that reduces what is promised. An improvement takes effect when we publish it. The version in force is the one shown in the portal on the day.
Rendered from thuma_backend/legal/sla.md.
The wording there is the original; this is a readable copy.