What this covers: how to reach us, how support requests are prioritised, how much downtime we commit to, what you get if we miss it, and exactly what we do not cover. Takes effect on 30 September 2026. Version 1.1: support has no set hours and no response times; requests are handled in priority order. Version 1.2 (1 November 2026): the worked examples use the Solo, Team and Expert prices.
In this document, "we", "us" and "our" mean Felix Venus, trading as Venakis.
This document forms part of the Terms of Service.
1. Read this part first
Venakis is a one person business. Felix Venus writes the software, runs the servers, and answers the support email. There is nobody else.
That has real advantages. When you email support you reach the person who wrote the code. There is no first line script, no ticket being escalated, no waiting for someone to ask someone else.
It also has real limits, and we would rather you know them before you sign up than discover them during an incident:
- Support is by email. There are no set support hours and no telephone support line.
- We do not commit to response times. Requests are handled in priority order: anything stopping your clients booking comes first, as soon as it is seen. But there is no on call rota, so we do not promise how quickly that will be, because for a one person business that would be committing to something we cannot honestly deliver.
- We do not commit to fixing anything within a set time. We commit to responding, to working on it, and to keeping you informed. See section 3.
If guaranteed response times or round the clock cover are a requirement for your business, Venakis is not the right supplier for you, and we would rather tell you that now than take your money and disappoint you later.
A note on what the website used to say. Earlier versions of venakis.com mentioned a 24 hour support line and a guaranteed fast response to critical issues at any time of day. Neither was true. This document replaces both, and the website copy has been corrected to match it.
2. How to reach us
| Channel | Email to help@venakis.com, or the support form at https://venakis.com/support |
| Hours | None set. Requests are read and handled in priority order (section 3). |
Telephone. There is no telephone support line. A telephone number is published on venakis.com for enquiries and complaints, because a services regulation requires one, but it is not a support channel and calling it will not get an issue fixed faster than emailing it. For a critical issue we will offer a callback if you want to talk it through, and we will usually offer that before you ask.
3. Priorities
Every request gets a real reply, not an automated acknowledgement: that we have the issue, what we think it is, and what happens next. There are no response times. Requests are handled strictly in priority order, highest first.
| Priority | What it means |
|---|---|
| P1 Critical | Your clients cannot make bookings, or you cannot get into the system to manage bookings. Core function completely unavailable, no workaround. Handled before anything else, as soon as it is seen. |
| P2 High | A major booking or payment function is failing or producing wrong data. Your business is significantly affected and there is no easy workaround. Handled next, after any P1. |
| P3 Normal | Bookings work. A supporting feature has failed, or there is a workaround. |
| P4 Low | Cosmetic issues, content errors, questions, feature requests. |
How priority is set. Use the support form at https://venakis.com/support to select a priority. A request sent by plain email is treated as P3 Normal by default, because an email carries no priority field and we cannot guess. If you think something is P1 or P2, say so and say why, and we will reclassify it. We may also reclassify a priority, up or down, and if we lower one we will tell you why.
We do not commit to resolution times. Issues vary enormously in complexity and some depend on third party systems we do not control. Instead:
- For P1 and P2 we will work on the problem as our first priority until service is restored or a workaround is in place, and we will keep you updated until it is resolved.
- For P3 and P4 we will tell you what we intend to do and roughly when.
That update commitment is the honest substitute for a resolution promise. What a one person vendor can genuinely offer is not "fixed within a set time" but "you will never be left wondering what is happening".
Your part. To fix a fault we usually need to reproduce it. Please tell us: what you were doing, the exact steps, what you expected, what happened, which browser or device, and a screenshot if you have one. We cannot fix what we cannot reproduce.
4. Availability commitment
We commit to 99.5% availability of the Service in each calendar month.
That allows about 3 hours 36 minutes of unplanned downtime a month.
Why 99.5% and not 99.9%. 99.9% allows 43 minutes a month. One bad deployment, one database migration that locks a table, one hosting instance that does not come back cleanly, and that is gone, most likely overnight when there is nobody on call. 99.5% is a number we can meet with one person and no rota. Several comparable small vendors publish exactly 99.5%, and some publish less. We would rather publish a number we can hit than a number that sounds better.
A further piece of honesty about the ceiling. Venakis runs on Vercel and on Render, with Stripe for payments and Resend for email. On the plans a business this size buys, those providers do not owe us a contractual availability commitment at all. Even at their top tiers, availability multiplies down a chain of dependencies, so our realistic ceiling is below our weakest supplier. We cannot promise you more availability than our suppliers promise us, and on the plans we are on they promise us nothing. The 99.5% figure reflects operational track record, not a guarantee we have bought upstream.
How availability is measured.
- Availability = (total minutes in the month minus Downtime) divided by total minutes in the month, expressed as a percentage.
- Downtime means a period of more than 5 consecutive minutes in which the Service is unavailable to you, as detected by our monitoring.
- Excluded periods (section 5) are not counted as Downtime and are removed from the calculation.
- Our monitoring records are the basis for the calculation. To make that verifiable rather than self serving, the results are published on the status page at https://venakis.com/status, which shows current status and every incident we have declared. If you think we have missed an incident, tell us and we will check our monitoring records with you.
5. What is not covered
None of the following counts as Downtime, and none of it attracts service credits:
Maintenance
- Planned maintenance inside the standing maintenance window: Sundays 02:00 to 05:00 UK time. Work done inside that window is excluded by definition and needs no separate notice.
- Planned maintenance outside that window, for which we will give at least 5 working days' notice by email and on the status page.
- Emergency maintenance needed to protect security or data integrity. We will tell you as soon as we can, which may be after the event.
Things outside our control
- Failure of any third party provider, including hosting, database, payment and email providers, named here as Vercel, Render, Stripe and Resend, and any provider that replaces them.
- The internet generally, DNS, network congestion, and any route between you and the Service.
- Force majeure, and anything else outside our reasonable control.
- Denial of service attacks, other attacks, and malware. We will respond to a security incident as a P1, but we do not guarantee the availability number through one.
Things at your end
- Your equipment, devices, browsers, software and internet connection.
- Acts or omissions of you, your staff or your agents.
- Use of the Service contrary to the documentation at https://venakis.com/help.
- Suspension for non payment, or where your account is otherwise not in good standing.
Scope limits
- Anything outside the definition of "the Service" in section 3 of the Terms of Service. Integrations with third party systems are not part of the Service.
- Features labelled beta, preview or pilot.
- Slowness or degraded performance short of the Service being unavailable.
- Time spent investigating a report that turns out not to be a fault in the Service.
Why this list is long. Because the carve outs our own suppliers apply to us are at least this broad. If we made our commitment narrower than theirs, we would be funding the gap out of a £29 to £149 monthly fee, and eventually we would not be here at all.
6. What you get if we miss it
6.1 Service credits. If availability in a calendar month falls below 99.5%, you may claim a credit against your next invoice:
| Availability in the month | Credit |
|---|---|
| 99.5% or above | none |
| 99.0% up to 99.5% | 10% of that month's fee |
| 97.0% up to 99.0% | 25% of that month's fee |
| Below 97.0% | 50% of that month's fee |
6.2 The right to leave. If availability falls below 99.5% in three consecutive months, or in any three months within a rolling six month period, you may end the contract immediately by written notice, whatever your plan or term, and we will refund fees you have prepaid for time you will not get.
That right matters more than the credit table. A 10% credit on £69 is £6.90 and does not fix your Saturday. Being able to walk away from a committed term, for free, when the service genuinely is not working, is the remedy with teeth. It also costs us nothing unless we are actually failing, at which point you should be free to go.
6.3 The rules that go with credits.
- Credits and the termination right in 6.2 are your sole and exclusive remedy for failure to meet the availability commitment.
- You must claim in writing to help@venakis.com within 30 days of the end of the month concerned, with the dates, times and a description of the unavailability. Credits are not applied automatically.
- Credits in any month cannot exceed 50% of that month's fee, and credits in any 12 months cannot exceed one month's fee.
- Credits require your account to be in good standing, with no overdue invoices.
- Credits are applied to your next invoice. They are not refunds, cannot be exchanged for cash, and expire when the contract ends.
Why the top band is 50% and not 100%. Our own suppliers cap their credits to us at half a month's hosting bill, which on our scale is a few pounds. If we promised you full refunds for a bad month we would be promising money we do not have. The termination right is the remedy for sustained failure. The honest version of the trade is: we will not refund you into insolvency, but we will let you leave for free.
7. Backups and recovery
- The database is hosted on Render Postgres, with continuous backups with 3 days of point-in-time recovery: it can be restored to its state at any moment in the last 3 days.
- Recovery objectives, stated as targets rather than guarantees: after a total loss we will restore service as our first priority, with no more than 24 hours of data loss in the worst case, and considerably less where point in time recovery is available.
Backups are not a substitute for you holding your own copy. The export facility described in Data Ownership and Exit is available to you free and at any time, and we recommend you use it monthly.
8. Holidays, illness and planned absence
No comparable published SLA addresses this, because nobody publishing one is a single person. It is the most obvious question a careful buyer will ask, so here is a written answer.
Planned absence
- Any planned absence of more than two consecutive working days is announced by email and on the status page at least 14 days in advance, with the dates and the cover arrangements.
- Planned absence is deliberately scheduled away from the peak periods of the businesses Venakis serves. We will not disappear for a fortnight in December.
- Change freeze: no planned releases in the 48 hours before an announced absence, and none during it. Most one person outages are caused by a deployment, and freezing deployments removes that risk precisely when we cannot respond to it.
What continues during an announced absence
- P1 and P2 continue: they are still handled first, and we will restore service or put a workaround in place.
- P3 and P4 wait until Felix is back. Nothing is lost; it waits.
Unplanned absence, including illness
- We will post on the status page and email active customers as soon as we are able to.
- The same P1 and P2 arrangement applies where Felix is able to work at all.
- If Felix is not able to work at all, the arrangements in Data Ownership and Exit apply, including the standing licence that takes effect on death or prolonged incapacity.
There is no second engineer, and we are not going to invent one. What there is instead: continuous backups with 3 days of point-in-time recovery, a change freeze around absence, and a complete self service data export you can take at any moment without asking us. That export is the real answer to the question "what if something happens to you", and it is worth more than a nominal cover arrangement we would never actually use.
9. Work at a time you choose
If you need work done at a particular time, for example a migration while your business is closed, it is available by prior arrangement only, subject to our availability, and charged per day or part day at a rate we quote in writing before the work is agreed. We may decline. This is not a retained on call service and we will not describe it as one.
10. Changes to this document
We may change this Service Level Agreement for a future term, or on 30 days' written notice for monthly plans. If a change reduces what we commit to, and it materially disadvantages you, you may end the subscription before the change takes effect without penalty. We will not reduce commitments part way through a term you have already paid for.
Every version is dated and previous versions are kept available at venakis.com so you can see what changed.