Reliability Has a Price Tag
In the last piece we talked about error budgets as a lever between speed and safety. This time we’re taking the conversation a step further: how to put a real price on reliability. SLAs, SLOs, and SLIs are the framework; they’re how you attach dollars to downtime and make reliability a board-level metric.
The Three Letters
SLA (Service Level Agreement): The formal promise to customers. Break it, and you may owe credits, refunds, or lose credibility in enterprise deals.
SLO (Service Level Objective): The stricter internal target you actually steer the company by. It’s your buffer against embarrassment.
SLI (Service Level Indicator): The cold, hard number. Did you actually deliver what you promised, or are you slipping?
Think of it this way: SLAs are contracts, SLOs are your insurance policy, SLIs are the reality check.
Error Budgets as Market Signals
An error budget isn’t just engineering’s allowance — it’s a market signal. It tells you:
How much trust you can “spend” before customers walk away.
Where to pace product bets: fast releases when you’re safe, defensive play when you’re not.
When to renegotiate contracts: if customers demand tighter SLAs, you know exactly what the extra nine will cost.
Error budgets move from an engineering guardrail to a number sales and finance can plan against.
Bill of Another Nine
Adding another nine is never free:
99.9% -> 99.99% trades ~39 minutes of downtime for a much bigger bill.
Extra regions, 24/7 on‑call, and pricier vendor tiers — all for a sliver of extra uptime.
Plus the hidden cost: fewer engineers on growth because more are tied up hardening and babysitting systems.
It’s not about whether you can buy another nine. It’s about whether the business case adds up.
Examples That Show Up
Streaming media: Your SLA may allow a blip, but a 2‑minute outage during the Champions League final? That’s brand damage money can’t easily repair.
Healthcare tech: If your platform misses its SLO for lab results delivery, it’s not churn — it’s lawsuits. Reliability here is regulatory armor.
B2B SaaS: An enterprise buyer will use SLA negotiations to squeeze on price. If you know the true cost of each nine, you negotiate from strength.
These examples are about more than uptime. They’re about contracts, margins, and survival.
Making Reliability a Line Item
To avoid fuzzy debates, drag reliability out of ops dashboards and into financial models:
Sales: Frame SLAs as upsell levers. Higher guarantees cost more.
Finance: Track reliability spend the same way you track marketing spend. Each nine is an investment line.
Product: Use error budgets as velocity governors. Risk isn’t emotional — it’s metered.
When reliability lives next to ARR and churn, it earns its rightful place as a business metric.
The Point for Executives
Reliability isn’t about building a perfect machine. It’s about quantifying how much imperfection your business can tolerate, how much it costs, and how to price it. SLOs and SLAs give you the numbers. Error budgets give you the dials. Together, they let you manage customer trust like any other asset on the balance sheet.
Coming Up Next
We’ve put price tags on reliability. Next I’ll show how to handle the bill when things go wrong: Incident Management and Postmortems — turning outages into structured learning instead of chaos and blame.
