Cloud providers owe service credits when they breach their published SLAs, but they never pay them automatically. The credit is only issued if the customer notices the breach, gathers the evidence, and files a claim inside a tight window. Most teams never do, so the money quietly stays with the provider. CloudSLACredit exists to close that gap, in the open, for free.
Who's behind CloudSLACredit
CloudSLACredit is built and maintained by the team behind Next Signal, a company focused on cloud reliability and FinOps. Our work involves tracking provider outages, reading SLA contracts across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud, and turning breach data into recoverable claims. We built this resource because the same questions came up again and again: which nines apply to my deployment, was this outage actually a breach, and how much is it worth?
The guidance here reflects that day-to-day work: the credit schedules, eligibility rules, claim windows, and evidence requirements we deal with directly. It is written for practitioners, finance leads, SREs, and FinOps consultants, who need to act on a specific breach, not read marketing copy.
How we source our numbers
Everything on this site traces back to primary sources. We do not estimate what a provider might owe; we work from what its contract actually says.
- Published SLA schedules. Credit percentages, uptime thresholds, and claim windows come from each provider's own service level agreement, linked directly on every provider playbook.
- A transparent formula. The calculator's math is the same public math every customer is entitled to. There is no hidden model, and we show the calculation, not just the result.
- Provider-specific rules. AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud differ on eligibility, architecture prerequisites, and deadlines. We keep each playbook specific rather than averaging them into a generic answer.
- Independent and free. There is no paywall and no lead-gate on the educational content. Always verify against your current agreement before you file, terms change.
Our relationship to Next Signal
We disclose this plainly on every page: CloudSLACredit is a free educational resource; Next Signal is the commercial SaaS platform that automates the same workflow, detecting breaches, gathering evidence, pricing claims, and generating the support tickets, across a customer's whole cloud footprint.
The two are complementary, not conditional. Nothing on this site requires Next Signal. The calculator, playbooks, and field guide give you everything you need to recover credits manually. Next Signal is simply the option for teams that would rather have the loop run automatically, end to end, than do it by hand every month. We think being explicit about that relationship is the honest way to run an "independent resource," so we say it out loud.
What you can rely on
Our editorial standards are simple and stated so you can hold us to them.
Editorial standards
- Every credit percentage, threshold, and deadline links to the provider's own SLA.
- Calculations are shown, not hidden, so you can reproduce them yourself.
- Illustrative figures and scenarios are always labeled as such, never dressed up as customer quotes.
- Pages carry a visible last-updated date, and we revise them when providers change their terms.
- The commercial relationship to Next Signal is disclosed on every page, not buried.