Availability, support and what we do when things go wrong
Availability
We aim for the service to be available 99.5% of the time in each calendar month. "Available" means the sign-in page responds and a signed-in user can open their History page and make a file. We measure it from our own monitoring, and we will share the figures for any month on request.
Time is not counted against availability where the cause is:
- planned maintenance announced under the next section;
- the VCA's own systems, portal or API being unavailable or slow;
- your internet connection, devices, browser, or the signing key or certificate held on your computer;
- something you or your team did in breach of the customer agreement;
- an event outside our reasonable control, as described in the customer agreement; or
- a feature marked as beta or preview.
Planned maintenance
We give account owners at least 48 hours' notice by email of maintenance that will take the service down, schedule it outside 08:00 to 18:00 UK time on working days wherever practical, and keep it to no more than four hours in any month. Emergency maintenance to fix a security problem may be shorter notice; we will still tell you as soon as we can and explain afterwards.
Around the deadline. From 16 November to 6 December 2026 we will make no non-essential changes to the service, so that the weeks either side of 29 November are as quiet as we can make them.
Service credits
If availability in a calendar month falls below the target, you can claim a credit against future fees:
| Availability in the month | Credit |
|---|---|
| Below 99.5% but at least 99.0% | 10% of that month's fee |
| Below 99.0% but at least 95.0% | 25% of that month's fee |
| Below 95.0% | 50% of that month's fee |
For an annual plan, "that month's fee" is one twelfth of the annual price. To claim, email josh.atherton@cocautodocs.com within 30 days of the end of the month, saying which dates and times you were affected. We confirm within ten working days and apply the credit to your next invoice; if there is no next invoice we pay it by bank transfer. Credits are your sole remedy for a shortfall in availability, and are not paid during a free trial.
Support
Support is by email to josh.atherton@cocautodocs.com, and by phone or video call where we arrange one. Support hours are Monday to Friday, 09:00 to 17:30 UK time, excluding English bank holidays. You reach the people who built the service.
| Plan | First response | Urgent problems |
|---|---|---|
| Trial | 2 working days | Best efforts |
| Starter | 2 working days | Next working day |
| Standard | 1 working day | 4 working hours |
| Unlimited | 4 working hours | 2 working hours |
An urgent problem is one where you cannot make, sign or download any file, or a file you have checked is being rejected by the VCA for a reason that appears to lie in the service. Put "Urgent" in the subject line. "First response" means a reply from a person who has read your message, not an automatic acknowledgement.
What support covers
Using the service: setting up your company and models, importing documents, making and correcting files, signing, sending to the VCA, exporting your data, and anything that looks like a fault. We will also tell you what a VCA rejection message means where we can.
What it does not cover: decisions on whether the VCA will accept a particular vehicle or approval, the content of your type approval, engineering questions about the vehicle, obtaining a signing certificate on your behalf, or support for your own computers, network or browser. Where we can point you to the right place, we will.
Incidents
If the service is down or degraded we email account owners as soon as we know, with what we know, and again when it is resolved. For any outage over an hour we send a short written account within five working days of what happened, what we did and what we have changed.
Backups and where your data lives
Your data is stored in a data centre in Amsterdam, in the European Union, and backed up daily with point-in-time restore, so it can be recovered to a moment rather than to the previous night. Backups are for recovering the service after a failure. You can take your own copy at any time by exporting from the Company page, and we recommend doing so before you cancel.
Security
Every connection is encrypted. Signing keys never reach us; they stay on your own computers by design. VCA credentials you enter are encrypted at rest. Every administrative action is logged. If we become aware of a security breach affecting your data we tell you within 48 hours, as set out in the Data Processing Agreement.
Changes to this page
We may improve these commitments at any time. We will not reduce them during a paid term without 30 days' notice to account owners, and the customer agreement's rules on material changes apply.
Effective 9 September 2026.