Software and platforms
SaaS subscription agreement
The paper behind hosted software sold as a subscription. Nothing is delivered and nothing is owned — the customer is granted access for as long as the subscription runs, and the agreement says what that access includes, who may use it, what happens to the customer's data during and after the term, and how the service may change. It usually travels with a data processing paper and, where uptime is promised, a service level document.
- In the catalogue
- Software and platforms
- Where it can live
- Any of the 184 governing laws
Who uses one
- Software companies selling access to a product on a recurring fee.
- Businesses subscribing to tools that will hold their operational data.
- Founders replacing a checkout tick-box with terms a customer's lawyer will read.
What you are deciding
- What the subscription includes, and how usage is counted
- Who may use the account, and whether access may be shared
- The fee, the billing period and how renewal works
- What the customer may not do — resell, reverse engineer, benchmark
- Who owns the customer's data, and who owns usage statistics
- What happens to data at the end, and for how long it can be retrieved
- How the service may change during the term
- Where liability stops, and what is excluded
Blanks you leave stay blank and wait in the room. Nothing is filled in from a guess.
The sections a draft usually has
- 1The parties and the service
- 2Access and permitted use
- 3Fees, billing and renewal
- 4Customer data and ownership
- 5Acceptable use
- 6Security and availability
- 7Confidentiality
- 8Warranties and disclaimers
- 9Limits on liability
- 10Term, suspension and termination
A general outline, not a required one. What turns up in a draft follows what you described. A contract is written in the order a contract is read.
What people call it
The names this kind of paper goes by. They are here because people search for them. They also filter the catalogue. They are not a wordlist the door matches. At the composer you describe the deal in your own words instead.
- saas agreement
- software as a service agreement
- subscription agreement software
- cloud services agreement
- platform agreement
- online services agreement
Questions people ask
- Is a SaaS agreement a licence?
- Usually it grants a right of access to a hosted service rather than a copy of software. That distinction affects what happens on termination: access simply stops, and there is nothing to return.
- Who owns the data a customer puts in?
- Papers of this kind commonly say the customer keeps ownership of its own content, while the provider may use aggregated or anonymised statistics. Saying so plainly is one of the things buyers look for first.
- What happens to data when the subscription ends?
- Agreements of this kind usually name a retrieval window and then a deletion point. Backups often persist for a further period, and the paper says so rather than implying instant erasure.
General answers about the document. Not advice about your situation. Not written about any one country.
Where it lives
A contract names the legal system it is governed by. That is a separate decision from which paper it is. You pick it at the door, from any of the 184 units in Governing law, including England and Wales, Delaware, California and New York.
You do not start from this page. Describe the deal in one sentence at the door. Read the draft back in plain language, in the order a contract is read.
Start it at the door →Related kinds