Reliability Objective
Building toward 99.9% uptime
Not a promise we've already kept. A standard we're working toward with 12 full-time engineers (41 counting contractors). The companies that hold this line run 200x to 500x more engineers. Every point of reliability here is earned through deliberate trade-offs between shipping and stability.
Where we actually are
Last 90 days
Target
99.9%
What this means
At 99.9%, we budget for 43 minutes of downtime per month. That's the margin between “reliable” and “broken.” Every incident eats into that budget, and when it runs low, we stop shipping features and fix foundations.
How we calculate uptime
Only severities that meaningfully degrade the platform count against uptime. Everything else is tracked on the timeline but spends no error budget.
Not counted isn't the same as not noticed. The dashed line on the trend chart counts every degraded minute at full weight — when it drops below the green line, users felt something even though the SLO never moved.
Why 99.9 and not higher
Each additional “nine” costs roughly 10x more to achieve — dedicated SRE rotations, multi-region failover, the works. At our size, 99.9% is the honest ceiling: ambitious enough to take seriously, grounded enough to actually hold.
SLO vs SLA
This is an internal objective, not a contractual guarantee. An SLO tells us when to invest in stability. An SLA tells you the consequences if we don't. We publish our SLO because we believe transparency builds more trust than fine print.
Allowed downtime by level
The team behind it
41 in the department29% full-time
All forty-one carry this number. Our contractors aren't a buffer around the work — they do it alongside our full-time engineers, often absorbing the same on-call load and the same crunch, without the equity or long-term security that's supposed to make that trade fair. Holding this SLO on a team this size means leaning on people harder than any company should, and that gap is ours to close, not theirs to keep covering. Naming it here is the floor, not the fix.
Who targets what
Counted against our 12 full-time engineers — the same kind of dedicated, long-term investment these organizations made. Our 29 contractors carry this line right alongside them; the gap is that we haven't yet backed them with the same commitment, not in anything they bring to it.
Most seed and Series A startups
No uptime target, no on-call rotation, no incident process. Downtime happens when someone notices. 95% means 18 days of outage per year.
Early Twitter, early Shopify, fast-scaling startups
Where companies land when they're growing faster than their infrastructure can keep up. Monitoring exists, someone carries a pager, but 3.5 days of downtime per year is the reality.
GitHub, Slack, Zoom — and us
Our target. Names like these hold it with dedicated platform and SRE teams in the hundreds of full-time engineers; we hold it with twelve. Our contractors are exceptional and carry this line with us — we just haven't backed them with the equity and long-term security those names gave their full-time teams. Same bar, a fraction of the headcount we've committed to.
Stripe, Google, Amazon
Dedicated reliability orgs, multi-region infrastructure. About 4 minutes of downtime per month.
Visa, Mastercard, NYSE
Global payment rails processing 65,000+ transactions per second, run by reliability orgs in the thousands. About 26 seconds of allowed downtime per month.
Air traffic control, medical devices, nuclear systems
Safety-critical systems with unlimited budgets. An entirely different engineering discipline from web services.