By ProspectSoft on Mon 02 July 2018 in Terms
Please read this policy for information about fair use of our Prospect solutions and services...
ProspectSoft Services Fair Use Policy
This ProspectSoft Fair Use Policy ("Fair Use Policy") accompanies the ProspectSoft Subscription Terms and Conditions, available at www.prospectsoft.com or a successor URL (the "Agreement") entered into between you ("Customer") and ProspectSoft Limited (“Supplier” or "ProspectSoft"). Capitalised terms used in this Fair Use Policy that are not defined herein have the meanings given to them in the Agreement.
The Supplier provides various Services including multi-tenanted SaaS solutions. Through this fair use policy we seek to ensure an optimal, as well as fair, user experience and support experience for all our customers. The Supplier is committed to an up-front, published, simple, transparent and no-nonsense subscription pricing model. We don't set out to tempt customers with low up-front pricing and then “pile on” additional charges for storage etc. We do not charge extra fees for storage or extra hidden charges when the services are used reasonably and normally. However to maintain that position (the lack of hidden charges) we need to ensure that the provision of our services is not monopolised by a small subset of customers. Ultimately, provision of the Services must be profitable, as well as fair and transparent.
That's why we monitor many Services and technical usage according to a Fair Use Policy. This Fair Use Policy has been created to prevent improper use of the software or abnormal use of Services, so we can offer all our customers an excellent user experience. The Fair Use Policy for our Services comprises, but is not limited to, elements such as support, storage, traffic, emails and compute – this includes for example file storage, database size, the amount of internal and external network traffic including web traffic, the number of emails sent from and received by our servers, and the amount of and length of database and API requests – including CPU time, memory use and queue lengths across all Services.
ProspectSoft does not charge extra costs when the Services are used reasonably and normally. When we determine the scope of Fair Use we take into account your contract, the observed use of more than a thousand Prospect users, technical advances and the current price rate of all necessary assets. We'll adjust these values when there is reasonable cause. In general, this will often mean expansion and raising of thresholds and reducing the cost of excessive use, as a result of lower costs of cloud storage and cloud computing. We will inform you in a timely fashion, when these changes affect your costs or use. When we detect something out of the ordinary in your ProspectSoft SaaS environment or Service usage, we'll contact you to discuss the situation and potential alternatives. In extreme cases, we may be required to limit the Service usage (e.g. limit your access to support, available storage, bandwidth, database usage, API usage or allowed emails). Alternatively we may discuss with you options for temporarily isolating your system from other multi-tenanted users and feed for dedicated hosting for some or all of your Services, or require you to purchase premium Services from us.
Support
Support is typically provided free of charge as part of the Services we offer. To ensure that all customers have equal access to support, we may restrict or suspend access to support for any customer that consuming more support time, or logging more support issues than a typical customer with similar users and a similar subscription.
Storage
Within your SaaS environment you can store documents to record correspondence with customers, website resources, as well as data and transactions in the database. To make sure that there is enough storage for everyone, we may limit the amount of data you can save. The amount of storage will depend on your type of contract and number of users. We've made sure that almost all customers have plenty of disk space when the solutions are used normally. You can always request the actual size of your data storage from our service desk. You can also free up more storage by removing data yourselves, or asking us to help you with our clean-up-service. If we detect that your organisation structurally saves more data than we consider to be fair and normal, we'll contact you to discuss the situation. It's possible to expand your storage and, if appropriate we will only charge a maximum of the published and publicly available Microsoft Azure storage charge for the relevant storage solution plus 20%. At that point we'll contact you to discuss alternative storage options.
Network Traffic and Bandwidth
To prevent a negative effect of excessive network traffic on your user experience or that of others, we monitor the traffic. We compare your use to the average use of all our SaaS customers with the same contract. With normal use you don't have to worry about the network bandwidth available to you. If we detect a situation that could lead to a decrease in service, we will contact you to discuss the situation. In some situations, we can intervene by limiting the available bandwidth.
Amount of sent and received emails
To prevent spam, we use worldwide blacklists, and spam blockers among other things. To guarantee smooth email traffic from our SaaS products for you and our other customers, we monitor the mail servers. Spam and blacklisting could happen when excessive amounts of emails are sent from the SaaS environments, for example. We maintain very broad margins based on the average use of our SaaS customers with similar contracts. With normal use, you won't notice a thing. When we detect abnormal values that could negatively impact the service, we may limit the number of emails you can send, or take other action as appropriate. Before we do this, or in urgent situations immediately after doing so, we'll always contact you to discuss possible solutions.
Compute and Load
To prevent a negative effect of excessive use of compute resources, on your user experience or that of others, we monitor the compute resources. We compare your use to the average use of all our SaaS customers with the same contract. With normal use you don't have to worry about the compute services available to you. Where increased usage is caused by the normal growth of users and customers, we will scale the resources available. If we detect a situation that reflects abnormal use or that could lead to a decrease in service, we will contact you to discuss the situation. In some situations, we can intervene by limiting the available compute resource.
Urgent and Extreme Cases
In an urgent or extreme case, for example where services are likely to be significantly impacted, or where we believe your system or ours is under attack (a DDOS - denial of service attack for instance) or where we believe your system or ours has been compromised (for example a hacker or potential a security breach) we may stop the services, or temporarily block your access to them. Before we do this, or in urgent situations immediately after doing so, we'll always contact you to discuss possible solutions.
In some cases, even without an attack or breach, if your use of the services continues to impact other users, is expected to do so, or is generating costs to us that are not normal when compared to other customers on the same contract and make our service to you unprofitable to maintain, we may isolate your services from the multi-tenanted environments and pass the costs onto you. Before we do this, or in urgent situations immediately after doing so, we'll always contact you to discuss possible solutions.
Start-ups and the Start-up subscription
Our Start-up subscription is a discounted service specially to help Start-up & growing businesses to find their feet. There's no universally accepted definition of a Start-up but, we define a start-up as a business that is a business that has less than 5 CRM users (i.e. less than 5 sales & customer service staff) and turns over less than £2M per annum. Any business older or larger than that doesn't qualify as a start-up for the purposes of our Start-up subscription pricing and should instead look at our alternative subscriptions.