A free SaaS contract template covers privacy, SLAs and exit terms

The workload

A solo founder selling software as a service eventually needs terms of service or a master services agreement a paying business customer's procurement team will actually accept, covering data handling, uptime, payment, and what happens if either side wants out. Common Paper publishes a free Cloud Service Agreement (CSA) template built for exactly that pairing: an Order Form for deal-specific terms, layered onto reusable Framework Terms and Standard Terms. The workload the template removes is drafting thirteen sections from scratch; the workload it leaves is filling in the Key Terms, fees, term length, service description, correctly for each deal and deciding which optional Standard Terms provisions the business needs.

What the documents show

Common Paper's own page states, verified, that the CSA's thirteen sections span the Order Form, Framework Terms, and Standard Terms, addressing service delivery and support, a Privacy and Security section covering Personal Data and Prohibited Data restrictions, payment terms, indemnification for third-party IP infringement claims, confidentiality, capped liability with stated exceptions, and termination tied to material breach, alongside auto-renewal. The Key Terms section requires naming a Governing Law and Chosen Courts rather than defaulting silently. Common Paper's homepage states, self-reported, that its standard agreements, including this one, are created and maintained by a committee of lawyers; the same page repeats the disclaimer that Common Paper is not a law firm and its forms are not customized for any client, a limit that applies here exactly as it does to the mutual NDA template documented separately in this batch.

The operating cost

The template costs nothing to download and use, per Common Paper's framing of it as a free standard. The unpriced cost is legal review time: a founder wanting confidence that the liability cap, data-processing terms, or termination language fit a customer's risk tolerance, or a jurisdiction's consumer-protection statute, still needs a lawyer to review the filled-in Order Form, since the disclaimer states the template was not built for any client's jurisdiction or facts.

The stop condition

The CSA's structure sets an implicit stop condition: it pairs a short Order Form against fixed Standard Terms, which works for as long as a customer accepts the published terms with only Order Form variables changed. The template stops being sufficient, on this reading, at the first customer demanding a negotiated departure from the Standard Terms themselves, a custom liability cap or a data-residency commitment the template omits. This is an editorial reading of what a minimal-negotiation contract is built to handle, not a threshold Common Paper states.

• Does the customer's procurement team ask for terms the Standard Terms section does not already cover, such as a data-residency guarantee?
• Has Governing Law and Chosen Courts been filled in deliberately, or left at whatever default the Order Form suggests?
• Would a regulator in the customer's jurisdiction require terms this template does not address?

Common Paper's text describes the CSA as a starting point built to reduce negotiation, not a jurisdiction-tested contract; its thirteen sections are a real inventory of what a SaaS agreement needs, and whether the language fits a given deal is left for a lawyer to answer.