Most IT support contracts lock you in for 36 months. Ours comes with a 90-day get-out clause that says if we haven’t earned your business by then, you don’t owe us a penny.

I want to spend a few minutes explaining why we offer that, what it actually says in the small print, and what the first 90 days look like from our side of the desk. This isn’t a marketing piece dressed up as a blog post. It’s a statement of terms - the same terms I sign off on every time we welcome a new hospitality operator onto our books.

Why we offer it

Three reasons, and I’ll be honest about all of them.

First, confidence. We know what our service is worth and we know what it looks like when it’s running well. Twelve months from now, you should feel that switching to CloudMatters was one of the better operational decisions you made this year. If you don’t feel that after 90 days, the chances of you feeling it after 36 months are slim, and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

Second, it removes the biggest objection in the room. Every single conversation I have with a prospective customer eventually arrives at the same question: “what if it doesn’t work out?” The honest answer used to be “you’d be stuck for the rest of the term, and we’d both be miserable.” Nobody likes that answer. The 90-day guarantee changes the conversation entirely. It moves the risk from your side of the table to ours, which is exactly where it should sit when we’re the ones being paid.

Third - and this is the one that matters most internally - we’d rather lose a customer in 90 days than spend 36 months arguing with one. Bad-fit relationships drain energy from both sides. They distract our engineers from the customers we’re serving well. They also tend to end in a complaint, a refund and a damaged reputation that we then have to spend a year rebuilding. A clean 90-day exit is cheaper for everyone.

What the guarantee actually says

Plain English, no asterisks hiding in the footer.

Within the first 90 days of your contract going live, if you decide our service isn’t right for you, you can give us notice and walk away. We will not charge you for the support fees you’ve paid during that window - they get refunded. We won’t bill you for the remainder of the contract term. We won’t apply an early termination fee. We won’t hold your data, your documentation, or your tenancy hostage during the handover to whoever comes next.

That’s the deal. It’s not conditional on you meeting some impossible bar to “qualify.” You don’t have to prove that we underperformed against an SLA. If you tell us, in writing, within 90 days that you want out, you’re out.

What doesn’t count

I said no asterisks, and I meant it, but transparency matters more than spin. There are two things the guarantee doesn’t cover, and I want to be straight about them up front.

The first is scope. If we agreed in the Statement of Work that we’d support, say, your EPOS, your network and your Microsoft 365 tenancy, and three weeks in you decide you also want us to manage your CCTV, kitchen displays and a bespoke booking platform we’d never heard of - that’s a scope change, not a service failure. We’re happy to discuss expanding the contract, but a disagreement about scope that was clear in the SoW isn’t grounds to invoke the guarantee.

The second is hardware. If we’ve ordered switches, access points, firewalls or any other physical kit on your behalf during onboarding, those costs are already incurred with our suppliers. We refund the support fees but not the hardware. You keep the kit.

Everything else - the service itself, the responsiveness, the engineers, the cultural fit, the way we handle a Saturday-night incident - is fair game. If any of that doesn’t meet your expectations, that’s exactly what the guarantee is for.

Why hospitality, specifically

We could offer this guarantee across any sector. We chose to build the company around hospitality, and the guarantee is shaped by that choice.

The cost of getting an IT decision wrong in hospitality is brutal. An EPOS outage on a Friday night isn’t an inconvenience - it’s lost covers, walked tables, and a queue of guests who won’t be back. A botched migration to a new platform during the run-up to Christmas can take a site’s quarterly numbers with it. Onboarding a new IT provider in this sector is intense by necessity: there are too many integrations, too many edge cases, and too many people who need to know what to do when something breaks at 7pm on a Saturday.

We want to be held accountable for getting that transition right. The 90-day guarantee is the mechanism that does it. It gives you a real, contractual lever to pull if we don’t deliver, in a sector where the cost of the wrong decision is much higher than the monthly support bill.

What the 90 days look like from our side

The guarantee only works if the first 90 days are taken seriously. Here’s what happens on our side of the fence.

Week zero, before the contract goes live, we agree the success criteria in writing. What does “good” look like 90 days in? Number of recurring incidents resolved? Mean time to respond on P1s? Specific projects delivered? Whatever matters to your business, we write it down. A guarantee without success criteria is just a vague promise.

Week one is the dedicated transition team - usually a project lead, two engineers, and an account contact - running daily standups with your operations lead. We pick up the phone every morning, we share what we found yesterday, what we’re doing today, and what we need from you to keep moving.

Weeks two through twelve, the cadence drops to a weekly review. We track progress against the success criteria, we surface anything that’s drifting, and we course-correct early rather than late. By week eight you should be able to tell, with data, whether the answer to “is this working?” is yes or no. The last four weeks are about turning early wins into stable, repeatable processes - because the whole point is that this carries on long after the 90 days are up.

The numbers behind the offer

I’d rather show data than make promises, so here’s what the guarantee actually costs us.

Our customer retention rate sits north of 95% year on year. The number of customers who have invoked the 90-day guarantee since we introduced it can be counted on one hand. That isn’t an accident. It’s the result of a transition process designed around the assumption that the customer can leave, and a service desk that operates as if every ticket is a chance to earn the next month’s fee.

If the guarantee were costing us a meaningful amount of revenue, we’d have changed it by now. The fact that it doesn’t is, frankly, the best evidence I can give you that the underlying service is doing its job.

A closing word

I started CloudMatters because I’d watched too many hospitality operators get stuck inside long contracts with IT providers who’d stopped listening the moment the ink was dry. The 90-day guarantee is my answer to that. It says: we will earn this every month, and if we don’t, you’re free to leave.

That’s the kind of company I want to run, and it’s the kind of relationship we want with every operator on our books. If you’d like to see how that works in practice, our hospitality IT support page sets out what we cover, our pricing page shows you what it costs, and the about us page introduces the team you’d actually be working with.

No 36-month handcuffs. No clever wording. Just 90 days to decide whether we’re worth keeping.

  • Mark Hanson, CEO