Maintenance and support services policy

1. Definitions

1.1. “REGULAR BUSINESS HOURS” means
(a) For Support pursuant to an Agreement with Axoniq B.V. (Netherlands): 09:00 to 17:00 CET/CEST (Central European Time, as observed in the Netherlands), Monday through Friday, excluding official public holidays in the Netherlands.

(b) For Support pursuant to an Agreement with Axoniq Inc. (United States): 09:00 to 17:00 CT (Central Time, as observed in the United States, whether CST or CDT), Monday through Friday, excluding federal public holidays in the United States.

1.2. “24/7” means 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, including public holidays. 

1.3. “NEXT BUSINESS DAY” refers to the first day with REGULAR BUSINESS HOURS immediately after the day LICENSEE has requested Support via the process stated in section 2.3 below. 

1.4. “Incident” means an unexpected event that disrupts normal operation of the Software.

Any other terms written with a capital are defined in the Terms of Service.

2. Scope of Support Services

2.1. SUPPORT. AXONIQ shall, during the term of the Agreement, provide to LICENSEE the Support Services as described in this Support Policy (“Support”). Support will be provided in English. AXONIQ shall establish and maintain the organization and processes to provide Support for LICENSEE. AXONIQ will provide Support by using its commercially reasonable efforts in (i) diagnosing Incidents and (ii) resolving Incidents.

2.2. ENVIRONMENTS. The particular environment (“Production”, “Non-Production” or “Development” as defined in the Agreement) in which an Incident for the Software has occurred determines the maximum severity level of the Incident. LICENSEE will receive Support in accordance with the response times corresponding to the severity level as indicated in the table in section 3.3.

2.3. PROCESS AND DELIVERY. LICENSEE must submit and obtain Support for Incidents occurring in both Production and Non-Production environments through AXONIQ's designated support portal. Alternatively, for severity 4 Incidents only, submissions may be made via electronic mail to support@axoniq.io. Any Incident reported solely through email will automatically be classified as severity 4. Notifications and updates regarding an Incident will be sent to the email address used when logging the Incident on the portal.

2.4. Support furthermore  includes:

• Bug fix prioritization for new and past minor releases, extending up to 3 minor releases in the past, as long as those minor releases were published in the past 2 years. 

• Enhancement- and feature-request prioritization for the Software. AXONIQ decides on the inclusion of enhancements and new features at its sole discretion.

3. Severity Levels and Response Times

3.1. SEVERITY LEVELS. AXONIQ uses the following severity levels for Incidents:

SEVERITY 1: Critical Business Impact. The production use of the Software is stopped or so severely impacted that LICENSEE cannot reasonably continue working. Examples include complete system unavailability, data loss or corruption, security breaches or data exposure, and stoppage of critical business processes (such as payment processing or order fulfillment) with no available workaround. This severity is not applicable to Non-Production or Development environments.

SEVERITY 2: Significant Business Impact. Important features of the Software are unavailable with no acceptable workaround, or severe performance degradation (greater than 50% degradation) is occurring in production. The production use of the Software is continuing, however, there is a serious impact on LICENSEE's productivity and/or service levels. This severity is not applicable to Non-Production or Development environments.

SEVERITY 3: Some Business Impact. Important features of the Software are unavailable but a workaround exists, or less significant features are unavailable without a reasonable workaround. This severity also applies where an upcoming production deployment is blocked due to an Incident. LICENSEE's work has minor loss of operational functionality. This severity is not applicable to Development environments.

SEVERITY 4: Minimum Business Impact. LICENSEE requests information, an enhancement, or documentation clarification regarding the Software but there is no impact on the operation of the Software. The implementation or production use of the Software is continuing and there is no work being impeded at the time. Any Incident occurring solely in a Development environment is automatically classified as Severity 4, regardless of its nature or impact. AXONIQ will consider enhancements for inclusion in a subsequent Update at its sole discretion. AXONIQ will determine the severity based on the information provided by LICENSEE and may adjust the severity of registered Incidents if deemed necessary.

3.2. PLANNED DOWNTIME AND SCHEDULED WORK. Requests for reserved availability during LICENSEE’s planned downtime or scheduled work is not included in Support. LICENSEE can either register Incidents as they occur during the planned work, or request dedicated resources, sufficiently in advance, as regular consultancy. If Severity 1 or 2 Incidents were determined to be directly caused by (planned) activities of the LICENSEE, outside of the Software’s intended usage, AXONIQ may charge the resolution costs to LICENSEE.

3.3. RESPONSE TIMES. Support will be provided in accordance with the response times specified in the table below. The response times begin when Support Services have been requested by LICENSEE following the process stated in section 2.3. For Severity 1 and Severity 2 Incidents, AXONIQ has an on-call team that will work on the Incident until an acceptable workaround is achieved, allowing it to be reduced to Severity 3 or 4 and passed on to regular support staff.

4. Licensee Obligations

4.1. RESOLUTION TIME CONSIDERATIONS. LICENSEE acknowledges that the time required for resolution of Incidents may vary depending on the specific circumstances of each Incident, including but not limited to: the nature of the Incident, the extent and accuracy of information available about the Incident, and the level of LICENSEE’s cooperation and responsiveness in providing materials. AXONIQ may also, in its discretion, reach out to LICENSEE proactively to offer onboarding support and other forms of assistance in LICENSEE’s use of the Software.

4.2. RESOLUTION PERSONNEL. LICENSEE is responsible for ensuring that its personnel that interact with AXONIQ have sufficient language and technical skills, have a baseline understanding of the Software, and respond to and cooperate with AXONIQ in a timely manner in connection to requests for Support. AXONIQ recommends that LICENSEE personnel complete the relevant training available through the Axoniq Academy prior to engaging Support, as familiarity with the Software is essential to efficient Incident resolution. LICENSEE agrees to use reasonable efforts to: (i) attempt to solve the problem and to utilize sufficient resources to clearly understand that a problem exists before consulting AXONIQ; (ii) provide AXONIQ with sufficient information and technical data in order for AXONIQ to establish that a potential problem is not the kind of problem that is an exclusion from Support; (iii) make reasonable attempts and expend reasonable resources to provide any data reasonably requested by AXONIQ to adequately address the potential problem; (iv) make reasonable attempts to resolve the problem as suggested by AXONIQ. If any of the above conditions is not met, AXONIQ may charge the extra time involved with the resolution to LICENSEE in accordance with its standard rates.

4.3. RESOLUTION CONDITIONS. AXONIQ will have no obligation to provide Support to LICENSEE in the event that (i) the Software has been changed, modified or damaged by LICENSEE or anyone other than AXONIQ, (ii) the problem is caused by LICENSEE’s negligence, misconduct, or misuse of the Software, or other causes beyond the reasonable control of AXONIQ, (iii) the problem is due to third party software not included in  the Software’s distribution and (iv) LICENSEE has failed to implement any Update or patch provided or made available by AXONIQ, where such Update or patch would have prevented or resolved the reported Incident. Support provided by AXONIQ does not cover the support of any third party software not part of the Software’s distribution or hardware which integrates with AXONIQ’s Software. In addition, Support does not include the following: (a) LICENSEE’s failure to comply with operating instructions contained in the documentation; and (b) installation, configuration, management and operation of LICENSEE’s infrastructure. LICENSEE is subject to additional fees charged by AXONIQ in accordance with its standard rates for the time and manpower allocated to the resolutions of these Incidents.

5. Software Updates

AXONIQ provides new versions of the Software (“Updates”) throughout the entire term of subscription unless otherwise specified in the Order Form or the Agreement. Updates made available to LICENSEE cover only the Software specified in the Order Form or the Agreement and do not include any software or services that AXONIQ sells or licenses separately. AXONIQ is under no obligation to develop any future software or functionality.

AXONIQ reserves the right to decide to cease further Updates for its Software. In such event, AXONIQ shall provide an end-of-support notification to LICENSEE in due course.

6. BILLABLE CONSULTANCY SERVICES (new section)

6.1. DISTINCTION FROM SUPPORT. Support Services as described in this policy are limited to assistance with Incidents and questions relating to the documented features and functionality of the Software. Requests that go beyond this scope are considered Consultancy Services and are subject to separate agreement .

6.2. CONSULTANCY SERVICES. The following are examples of activities that fall outside the scope of Support and constitute Consultancy Services:

• Custom architecture design or review for LICENSEE's specific use case, including disaster recovery and backup design;

• Installation guidance tailored to LICENSEE-specific infrastructure requirements;

• Code review of LICENSEE's implementation;

• Performance tuning beyond standard Software configuration guidance;

• Custom integration design with third-party systems;

• Writing, implementing, or migrating custom code on behalf of LICENSEE;

• Building proof-of-concept implementations or demos;

• Onsite or dedicated training sessions beyond standard documentation and Academy resources;

• Workshop facilitation, including event modeling sessions;

• Health checks, architecture reviews, and capacity planning analyses;

• Custom monitoring setup and performance optimization guidance beyond documented best practices.

6.3. TRANSITION FROM SUPPORT TO CONSULTANCY. Where AXONIQ determines during the course of a Support engagement that a request falls within the scope of Consultancy, AXONIQ will notify LICENSEE and present the available options, including the estimated effort and cost for consultancy delivery. AXONIQ will not proceed with billable consultancy work without prior agreement from LICENSEE.