Support and response times

The working-day figures above are the longest we would expect to take, not what we are aiming for. Most issues finish well inside them, and a high priority fault is very often sorted the same day.

We do not hold work back to fill a window. A confirmed high priority issue goes to the top of the queue and it ships as soon as it is tested. We would rather fix something properly than fix it quickly and break the thing next to it.

What we will not do is give you a second, shorter number. A number we quote is a number you are entitled to hold us to, and we would rather beat one honest figure than miss two optimistic ones.

Support is for the people who run the app at your Maktab: the account owner, and the admin staff who work in it every day.

Teachers and parents should go to their Maktab, not to us. We cannot answer questions about a child's fees, classes, register or records, and it would be wrong if we could, because those records are yours and not ours. If a parent writes to us we will point them back to you, politely.

This is not us being unavailable. It is the only arrangement that works: one of our Maktabs has 589 children on its roll, and a support line open to every family at every Maktab would be answering nobody properly within a fortnight.

Email us at contact@themaktabapp.com. Tell us what you were trying to do, what happened instead, which page you were on, and whether it is affecting one person or everybody. A screenshot saves us both a morning.

We are building a way for account owners to raise an issue from inside the app, which will timestamp it properly and let you see where it has got to. When it lands, this page will say so.

We aim to reply to everything within one working day, and most messages are answered the same day. That is the same commitment our terms of service make, and it is the one on this page we hold ourselves to properly.

A reply means a real person has read it, decided how urgent it is, and told you what happens next. It does not always mean it is fixed yet.

That is our ordinary service, and it is the one most Maktabs are on most of the time. When you first join us you get something different, and it is described below.

Starting a new system in a working Maktab is the hard part. Not the software, the switch: a roll of students in a spreadsheet somebody else built, classes that never quite matched the timetable, and a room full of teachers who need it to work on Saturday morning whatever happens.

So your first weeks with us run differently. We call it Hypercare, and it is not a faster version of the queue. It is us doing the work with you.

We set your Maktab up. Not you. We load your students, your guardians and your staff from whatever you have, a spreadsheet, an old system, or a stack of paper. We build your classes, your programmes and your timetable with you rather than handing you an empty screen and a manual. If your data is messy, that is normal, and sorting it out is part of the job we are doing.

You get a phone number, and a person on the end of it. Ordinary support is by message, and there is a good reason for that: it is written down, it is searchable, and nothing gets lost. In Hypercare that flips. You can pick up the phone and talk to us, and most of Hypercare is spoken rather than typed, because the questions in week one are the sort you ask out loud. We give you the number when we start.

And we reply the same working day, rather than within one, for anything you do put in writing.

How long it lasts. The first 30 days after your Maktab goes live, and 14 days after a release that changes how you work. We tell you when it starts and when it ends, so nobody is left guessing whether they are still in it. If your first term is genuinely rocky, say so and we will extend it. We would rather do that than have you limp through.

What we need from you. Someone at your end who can answer questions about how the Maktab actually runs, and your data in whatever state it is in. We cannot invent your timetable, and we would not want to. Everything else is ours.

(It is called Hypercare because that was the least embarrassing name available. What it means is that for the first month you can phone us, and we will do the boring bits.)

We set the priority, not you. That is not us overruling you. It is that we can see whether a fault is hitting one Maktab or all of them, and from where you are sitting you cannot.

For anything critical or high we tell you what we have set and why. If you think we have called it wrong, say so and we will look again and give you an answer either way. We move things up when a problem turns out to be bigger than it first looked, and down when it turns out to be smaller.

(Every issue is urgent to the person who raised it. We do know. We still have to put them in some sort of order.)

It means the problem has stopped getting in your way. That can be one of three things.

A fix. We change the code and the problem is gone.

A workaround. We give you a reliable way to carry on while we do the real fix properly. If we do this we will say plainly that it is a workaround, and tell you when the proper fix has shipped.

An answer. Sometimes the app is working as intended and what was needed was an explanation, a setting changed, or somebody walking you through it.

A workaround counts as putting it right. A workaround that only half works does not, and we will not pretend otherwise.

A working day means Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm UK time, not counting public holidays in England and Wales. That is what "working day" means everywhere on this page and in our terms. The clock starts when your message reaches us.

Now the awkward part, which we would rather say than let you discover on a Saturday. Maktabs teach in the evenings and at weekends. Ordinary office hours are almost exactly the opposite of when you need us most. So critical issues are not held to office hours:

For a critical issue we aim to be working on it within two hours at any point between 8am and 9pm UK time, seven days a week, including weekends and school holidays. Between 9pm and 8am we may not see it until the morning. We could promise otherwise. It would not be true.

Everything below critical waits for the next working day.

If your Maktab is outside the UK, the clock is still ours. Your Monday morning in New South Wales is our Sunday night, and a message sent then reaches us on our Monday. We would rather you knew that when you signed than found it out in the middle of term.

In Ramadan our hours shift later, and we will tell you the new ones before it starts. We close for both Eids. Your timetable changes then too, so if you need help rearranging classes, ask us in the fortnight before rather than the night before.

We are a small team. When the person who answers support is away, ill or travelling, critical cover carries on and everything else may take a day longer than usual. We will tell you when that is the case rather than leave you waiting and wondering.

Some things do not go in a queue at all.

If one Maktab can see another Maktab's information, or anything at all looks like records reaching someone who should not see them, it is critical from the moment we hear about it. If the quickest way to stop it is to switch a feature off, or take the app down, we will do that first and explain afterwards. A feature turned off is safer than a feature leaking.

You do not have to be sure before you tell us, and you should not wait until you are. Working out whether something is a breach is our job. We would far rather look at ten false alarms than hear about the real one a week late.

If it turns out personal information has been exposed, lost or changed without permission, our Data Processing Agreement takes over from this page. We will tell you within 24 hours of confirming it, because you are the data controller and you are the one who has to decide whether to tell the Information Commissioner and the families involved. Nothing on this page shortens that, lengthens it, qualifies it or replaces it.

This is not a safeguarding route. If you have a concern about a child, follow your own safeguarding procedure and speak to your designated lead. What we will do is treat any fault that stops you recording or reaching safeguarding information as critical, at any hour.

These targets are for problems with our app. They do not apply to:

Your own broadband, wifi, devices, printers or Maktab network.

Information entered wrongly, or deleted on purpose and regretted afterwards. We will always help you put it right. We just cannot promise how long that will take.

Settings changed at your end that have had an effect you did not expect.

An outage at a company we build on, which is the next section.

New features, changes to how something works, and new reports. We want to hear every one of them, and a good number of things in the app are there because somebody asked. But a request is not a fault, it does not get a resolution target, and we will tell you honestly whether it is something we plan to build.

(A new report is not a bug, however carefully it is described as one.)

We build on other companies, because that is how modern software works and because they run that infrastructure better than we could. Payments go through Stripe, the app is served by Cloudflare, your records live in a Neon database, email is sent by Resend, and signing in with Google uses Google. The full list is on our sub-processors page.

If one of them has an outage we cannot fix their systems. What we can do, and will:

Work out quickly whether the problem is ours or theirs, and tell you which. Tell you plainly what is affected and what still works. Chase them, and keep chasing them. Keep you posted as we learn things, rather than going quiet. Tell you when it is back, and what it means for anything that failed while it was down.

We will not send you to Stripe. You bought The Maktab App and we stay the people you talk to. To be straight with you, their service agreements are with us and not with you, so there is nothing there for you to claim against. What you have is us, staying on it and staying in touch.

This changes how long a fix takes. It does not change who answers to you. Our Data Processing Agreement says we remain fully responsible for what our sub-processors do with your data, and nothing on this page changes that. And if their systems have exposed your Maktab's information, we tell you within 24 hours of confirming it, whether or not they have finished their own investigation and whether or not they have given us the full picture.

We do our updates outside teaching hours wherever we can, and we tell you in advance when a change will be noticeable. Planned work we have told you about beforehand is not an outage.

We avoid shipping anything risky in the first week of your term or in the middle of enrolment, which is when you can least afford a surprise.

We aim to keep the platform available at all times and we monitor it continuously. We do not publish a contractual uptime figure and we do not offer service credits, and we would rather say so than quote a number with no remedy attached to it.

Here is the honest arithmetic. A service credit from a company our size would come to a few pounds, and a few pounds does not begin to make up for a Saturday morning without your registers. It would be a gesture, and you deserve better than a gesture.

What we offer instead is plainer. We tell you what went wrong, in writing, without being chased. And you are never locked in: you pay monthly or yearly by card, there is a 30 day money back guarantee on a new subscription, and you can export everything and leave whenever you choose. A company that has to earn your custom again every month has a real reason to answer the message.

Tell us. We would much rather hear it from you than have you quietly decide we are not very good.

There is no second line to escalate to here, because there is no first line. You are already talking to the people who write the code. What escalation means with us is this: we put in writing what happened, why it took as long as it did, when it will be sorted, and what we are changing so it is less likely next time.

If you would rather make it formal, our complaints procedure explains how, and we will not think any less of you for using it.

These are the commitments we can make today, as a small team. As we grow we expect to improve them, and we would rather update this page than let it quietly go stale, in-sha-Allah.

If we ever have to reduce anything here, we will tell every Maktab before it changes rather than after. Every version is numbered and dated.

Questions about any of it: send us a message.