About this service
A service level agreement — the contract that defines with what quality, at what times and under what conditions a cloud application service must be delivered to the customer — is today an indispensable legal component of almost every digital service. Georgian legislation has no separate statute for this type of agreement: a service level agreement is an ordinary contractual construction governed by the general norms of the Civil Code. Our service is built on precisely those norms: we help service providers draft agreements that genuinely protect their interests, and we help customers analyse the terms they are asked to sign before the signature.
Freedom of contract — why there is no statutory service level
Article 319 of the Civil Code establishes the principle of freedom of contract: subjects of private law may, within the limits of the law, freely conclude contracts and determine their content; they may also conclude contracts that are not provided for by law but do not contradict it. For service level agreements this is especially significant: quality indicators — uptime, response times, support tiers, recovery duration — are pure contractual content. The law sets no indicator and defines no minimum standard; everything is what the parties agree on. A poorly drafted agreement therefore means, in practice, that the service level is left unprotected. Freedom of contract nonetheless has boundaries: a party holding a dominant position on the market bears an obligation to contract and may not without justification offer the counterparty unequal terms, while a person acting for non-commercial purposes may not be refused a contract without substantiation.
When standard terms become part of the contract
In cloud-service practice, the service level agreement and the terms of service are frequently presented as standard terms — a uniform form offered to every customer. Article 343 of the Civil Code regulates their incorporation: standard terms become an integral part of the contract concluded between the offeror and the other party only where the offeror makes a clearly visible notice at the place of conclusion and refers to those terms, and the other party has the opportunity to acquaint itself with their content and, if it agrees, to accept them. This means that a link to the terms which hides from ordinary attention may, without proper reference, simply not count as part of the contract. Where the other party is itself an entrepreneur, the standard terms are considered incorporated where they would have had to be accounted for when exercising due diligence in the business relationship.