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SaaS Contracts

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SaaS contracts decide who owns your data, what uptime you can count on, and how you get out — we draft and negotiate subscription, service-level, and data-handling terms that hold up in cloud-delivered deals.

A SaaS contract is not a software license with the serial numbers filed off. You never possess the code, your data lives on someone else's infrastructure, and the relationship is ongoing rather than a one-time sale. We draft and negotiate SaaS agreements that account for how cloud-delivered software actually works, on either side of the table.

Service Levels That Bite

An SLA promising 99.9 percent uptime means nothing if the remedy is a token credit and the math is rigged. We negotiate availability commitments, response and resolution times, and performance standards with measurement methods spelled out and remedies that actually cost the provider something when it misses. Having built and operated software ourselves, we know which numbers are aspirational and which are achievable, so the commitments you sign are ones the service can really meet.

Your Data, Your Terms

When you move to SaaS, you hand your data to a vendor and trust them to guard it. We pin down who owns the data and any derived analytics, what security controls apply, how fast you learn about a breach, and what happens at termination. The exit terms matter most: we secure your right to export everything in a usable format and to confirm the provider has deleted its copies once you walk away.

Subscription and Renewal Terms

Pricing, usage limits, and renewals are where SaaS deals quietly go sideways. We structure subscription terms covering seat or usage tiers, overage charges, true-ups, and termination rights. We watch the auto-renewal and price-escalation clauses closely, so you are not locked into a multi-year increase you never agreed to or trapped by a notice window you missed.

Avoiding Vendor Lock-In

The point of cloud software is flexibility, which evaporates if switching providers means losing your data or rebuilding integrations from scratch. We negotiate portability, data-return, and transition-assistance terms so you can leave on your timeline. Where it makes sense, we push for documented APIs and standard export formats in the contract itself, keeping a future migration a business decision rather than a hostage situation.

Frequently asked questions

Focus on the uptime commitment, how uptime is measured, what's excluded from the calculation, and what you actually get when the vendor misses. Make sure service credits are meaningful and that repeated failures give you the right to terminate. A 99.9 percent number means little if the exclusions are broad enough to cover most real outages.

You should keep ownership of your data, and the contract should say so plainly. Just as important, clarify what the vendor is allowed to do with it, common flashpoints are usage analytics, aggregating your data with others', and using it to train AI models. Spell out those permissions rather than leaving them to a vague catch-all clause.

Require the vendor to meet recognized standards like SOC 2 or ISO 27001, conduct penetration testing, encrypt data in transit and at rest, and notify you promptly if there's a breach. Tie the breach notification to a specific timeframe so it's enforceable. These terms give you something concrete to hold the vendor to rather than a general promise to be secure.

Build in the right to export your data, transition assistance from the vendor, and reasonable termination provisions, and avoid proprietary formats that make your data hard to move. The time to negotiate your exit is before you sign, while you still have leverage. Otherwise you can find your data effectively trapped when you most want to switch.

Find out who actually processes your data, since SaaS vendors often rely on subprocessors like cloud hosts. Require that any subcontractor meets the same security and confidentiality standards as the primary vendor. Otherwise your protections are only as strong as the weakest party in the chain.

Possibly, depending on your industry and data. Where the data is stored, the security controls required, and sector-specific rules like HIPAA or financial regulations can all affect whether a given SaaS arrangement is compliant. Evaluate those implications before you commit, not after a regulator asks.

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