Glossary
What is Service Level Agreement (SLA)?
A Service Level Agreement is a documented commitment specifying the measurable standard of service a provider guarantees — response time, uptime, resolution time — along with what happens if that standard isn't met.
A useful SLA is specific and checkable, not aspirational — "we respond quickly" isn't an SLA; "initial response within 24 hours" is, because it can be verified against an actual timestamp rather than argued about after the fact.
SLAs are most consequential in ongoing engagements (managed ad accounts, retained development work, hosted software) where the client has limited visibility into day-to-day work and needs a concrete standard to hold the relationship accountable to, rather than relying on trust alone.
A written scope and a stated response-time commitment agreed before work starts function as a lightweight SLA even outside formal retainer contracts — the same discipline, applied at whatever scale the engagement actually calls for.