Service level agreement

We aim to keep the website and the opportunities API available 99.9% of the time, measured monthly and excluding scheduled maintenance. Scheduled maintenance is announced at least 48 hours in advance, is kept to windows outside of common funder deadline periods, and never exceeds four hours in a month.

The public list is rebuilt from funder sources on a daily cycle. A newly published call from a source we monitor appears within 48 hours of publication. Where we know a programme has closed or been discontinued we remove it within the same cycle. Amounts marked as estimates are our reading of the programme, not a funder statement, and are flagged as such in the list.

When we are preparing an application for you we commit to putting the complete draft in front of you at least five working days before the funder's deadline, or, for calls that open with less than three weeks' notice, within seven working days of the call opening. If we cannot meet that we tell you as soon as we know, and no later than ten working days before the deadline, so you can decide whether to proceed.

Submission happens only after your approval. Once you approve, we submit within one working day and confirm the funder's receipt to you.

Questions about an application in progress are answered within one working day. Questions about funds we hold for you are answered within one working day, and transfer requests to your institution are initiated within three working days of the request, subject to the checks the award terms require. General enquiries are answered within three working days.

Balances held for you are reconciled daily against our payments partner and are visible to you at any time. Any discrepancy is investigated and corrected within five working days of being identified, and you are told about it.

If an outage, data issue, or missed commitment affects you, we tell you within 24 hours of confirming it, explain what happened and what we changed, and, where a deadline was affected, contact the funder on your behalf to ask for an extension.

We cannot control funder portals, institutional approval processes, or third-party providers, and the commitments above stop where those begin. Nothing here is a promise that an application will be funded.

We are free, so there is no credit to refund. What we offer instead is transparency: every missed commitment is recorded, reviewed by the team, and reported in our annual update to the researchers and funders who support us. If we repeatedly fail you, we will say so plainly and help you move your applications elsewhere.

This policy forms part of our terms of service with Open Research Fund Ltd., a company limited by guarantee incorporated in Singapore, and is governed by the laws of Singapore in the same way.