How to claim an SLA credit from Twilio (and why your carrier fees don't count)

Twilio's SLA is one of the simplest to read and one of the easiest to over-value. The credit is a single flat percentage with no tiers to work out — but the number it is multiplied by is not your Twilio bill. Twilio strips carrier fees, taxes and third-party charges out of the base before applying it, and on a messaging or voice account those pass-through charges can be most of what you pay.

The short answer

If the Twilio Services APIs fall below 99.95% availability in a calendar month, you are owed an API Service Credit of 10% — a flat percentage, not a tiered one — calculated on the fees you actually incurred for the affected Twilio Services APIs that month, excluding taxes, carrier fees and surcharges, and any other third-party charges. You must submit a support ticket with "SLA Claim" as the subject within 30 days from the last day of the affected calendar month. Twilio does not pay it automatically, and the credit is stated to be its sole and entire liability for the failure.

What threshold applies to you?

Twilio publishes more than one bar, and which one you are measured against depends on what you bought:

The premium SendGrid packages Twilio names are Email Deliverability, Email Experts as a Service, Email Program Management, and Email Strategy – Gold. SendGrid additionally carries a Successful Connection Rate commitment, whose failure triggers the same 10%.

Note what the second and third rows do to your maths. At 99.95% a month allows roughly 22 minutes of unavailability; at 99.99% it allows roughly 4. An Enterprise Edition account and a standard account can live through the identical outage and only one of them is in breach. If you have been checking your Twilio months against 99.9% out of habit, you are using a bar Twilio does not offer — see what a 99.9% SLA actually allows for why that one number gets misapplied so often.

How Twilio measures it

Twilio's formula is stated plainly: (A − B) / A × 100, where A is the total minutes in the calendar month and B is Unavailable Monthly API Time — the minutes in that month during which the APIs were unavailable for use, less anything Twilio excludes. So this is wall-clock minutes, not an error-rate metric. (Some vendors do it the other way; the distinction decides what evidence you need, and it is worth reading how SLA uptime is actually measured before you assemble anything.)

Two exclusions do real work here:

• Outages shorter than five continuous minutes do not count. A month of brief, repeated blips can be genuinely disruptive and still produce a B of zero. This is the single most common reason a Twilio month that *felt* bad is not claimable.
• Scheduled maintenance announced 24 hours ahead, emergency maintenance, alpha/beta/preview services, and problems in the telecom or internet path beyond Twilio's own network access point are all outside the count. That last one matters on voice and SMS specifically: a carrier failing downstream of Twilio is not Twilio's unavailability.

Why the credit is smaller than 10% of your invoice

This is the part worth internalising before you spend an afternoon on a claim. Twilio's credit calculation explicitly excludes:

1. taxes, levies, duties and similar government exactions;
2. communications-service or telecommunications-provider (carrier) fees and surcharges; and
3. any other charges related to or imposed by a third party.

On a Twilio account weighted toward SMS or voice, a large share of the monthly total is carrier pass-through. Ten percent of what remains after those are removed is not ten percent of what you paid. We are not going to invent a ratio for you — it depends entirely on your product mix — but pull one invoice, separate the Twilio API fees from the carrier lines, and you will know your own real ceiling in about ten minutes. That is also the number our Twilio SLA page calculator wants: the API fee base, not the invoice total.

Which Twilio products are *not* covered

The Twilio APIs SLA does not govern everything under the Twilio brand. Products branded Segment / Twilio Segment / Twilio Engage, products branded Stytch, and Flex Critical Scenarios are carved out and sit under their own separate agreements. Products no longer available or supported are excluded too.

This matters more than it looks. If your outage was in Segment and you file it under the APIs SLA, you are filing under a document that says it does not apply to you — and the deadline on the agreement that *does* apply is running the whole time. Establish which SLA governs before you write a word.

How to claim a Twilio SLA credit

1. Identify the affected calendar month and which Twilio APIs were unavailable, and confirm the product is governed by the Twilio APIs SLA rather than a Segment, Stytch or Flex agreement.
2. Build your Unavailable Monthly API Time from Twilio's status page, discarding any continuous outage shorter than five minutes and anything inside announced maintenance. Twilio's incident record is on its status page.
3. Compute availability as (A − B) / A × 100 and compare it against the threshold your plan carries — 99.95% standard, 99.99% on Enterprise / Administration Edition or a premium SendGrid package.
4. Work out your fee base: the fees you actually incurred for the affected APIs that month, with taxes, carrier fees and surcharges and third-party charges removed. Ten percent of that figure is the credit.
5. Open a support ticket at help.twilio.com — or support.sendgrid.com for a SendGrid Services API claim — with "SLA Claim" as the subject, exactly. Twilio names the required subject in the SLA itself.
6. Include your Account SID, the affected products, the dates and times of the Unavailable Monthly API Time as calculated from the status page, and any documentation supporting it.
7. Submit within 30 days from the last day of the affected calendar month. The clock is anchored to the month, not to the incident — so an outage on the 3rd and one on the 28th share a deadline, and the late-month one leaves you far less usable time.

Frequently asked questions

Does Twilio refund you for downtime?

Not in cash. Twilio's remedy is an API Service Credit worth 10% of the fees you incurred for the affected APIs in the month of the failure, and the SLA states this is Twilio's sole and entire liability and your sole and exclusive remedy for missing the availability threshold.

What is Twilio's uptime SLA?

99.95% Monthly API Availability for the standard Twilio Services APIs, and 99.99% for the Enterprise / Administration Edition and for the SendGrid Services API on Twilio's named premium email packages. Availability is (A − B) / A × 100, where A is the total minutes in the calendar month and B is Unavailable Monthly API Time.

How much is a Twilio SLA credit worth?

A flat 10% — there is no tier that pays more for a worse month, unlike the graduated tables the large clouds use. Applied to the fees actually incurred for the affected APIs that month, after taxes, carrier fees and surcharges and third-party charges are excluded.

How long do I have to claim a Twilio SLA credit?

Thirty days from the last day of the calendar month in which the failure occurred. Thirty days from month-end is mid-market: tighter than the two months some vendors allow, looser than the vendors whose windows close in days.

Am I owed a credit if Twilio was down for three minutes?

No. Unavailable Monthly API Time excludes any outage lasting under five continuous minutes, so a three-minute interruption contributes nothing to B — however visible it was on the status page and however much it cost you.

Does the Twilio SLA cover Segment, Stytch or Flex?

No. Segment / Twilio Engage, Stytch, and Flex Critical Scenarios are expressly outside the Twilio APIs SLA and are governed by their own service level agreements, with their own thresholds and their own deadlines.

What subject line does a Twilio SLA claim need?

Exactly "SLA Claim". Twilio specifies the subject in the agreement itself, alongside the dates and times of the unavailability and the supporting documentation — so a ticket that describes the outage well but is titled anything else is not the request the SLA describes.

Methodology & caveats

The 99.95% and 99.99% thresholds, the flat 10% credit, the (A − B) / A × 100 formula and its definition of A as the total minutes in the calendar month, the five-minute minimum outage duration, the exclusion of taxes, carrier fees and surcharges and third-party charges from the credit base, the product carve-outs, the required "SLA Claim" subject and its accompanying evidence list, and the filing window are all transcribed from Twilio's published Twilio APIs Service Level Agreement into Ontracko's vendor profile. Ontracko's profile records the flat 10% tariff, the month-anchored window and the exact subject line; the "roughly 22 minutes" and "roughly 4 minutes" figures are our arithmetic on a 30-day month, not Twilio numbers. Twilio revises the agreement, and a negotiated Order Form can differ from the public terms — read the operative version and your own contract before filing. Twilio's tariff and incident record are on its SLA page and status page; for how Twilio's terms sit against the rest of the market see which SaaS vendors actually pay SLA credits, the reliability rankings, SLA credit vs service credit and the SLA glossary.

*Twilio's window opens when the month closes and shuts 30 days later, and the outage that owes you money has to have lasted five minutes to count at all. Ontracko watches the Twilio status feed, scores the month against the threshold your plan actually carries, and assembles the claim before the window closes. Monitor Twilio free — 8% only on recovered credits. See Twilio live status or open the Twilio SLA page.*