Most SaaS contracts are written by the vendor's legal team to look reasonable while quietly preserving every option that matters — silent auto-renewal, indemnification carve-outs, data rights that survive termination, and pricing escalators that hide in an order form. Scrutr's AI reads the entire agreement, identifies the patterns that matter, and tells you exactly what to push back on.
What Scrutr looks for in a SaaS agreement
Scrutr checks the seven clauses that decide whether a SaaS contract is fair: auto-renewal terms and notice periods (the most common trap), data ownership and what happens to your data on termination, uptime SLA with real remedies versus toothless guarantees, indemnification scope and any one-way carve-outs, limitation of liability caps benchmarked against your annual spend, price escalation language and cap, and termination rights — both for convenience and for cause. Each is scored HIGH / MEDIUM / LOW and explained in plain English.
Why MSAs are different from order forms
A SaaS deal usually has two documents: a Master Services Agreement (MSA) with the long-term terms, and an order form with quantities and prices that often quietly amends the MSA. Scrutr reviews both together when you paste them, surfaces conflicts between them, and flags order-form changes that override your negotiated MSA terms — a pattern enterprise sales teams use to walk back hard-won concessions on renewal.
Auto-renewal: the one clause every SaaS contract gets wrong (in their favor)
The default in most SaaS contracts is automatic renewal at the then-current rate with a 60- or 90-day notice window. Miss the window and you're locked in for another year at whatever price increase the vendor decides to apply. Scrutr flags this every time, suggests language that caps annual increases (typically CPI or 5%, whichever is lower), and asks for a 30-day notice window instead of 60.
Data ownership and exit rights
The clauses that matter most when you leave a SaaS vendor are the ones nobody reads when they sign up. Scrutr checks: who owns customer data during the term, what happens to data on termination (deletion timeline, export format, fee for export), whether the vendor retains a license for any data after termination, and whether the customer has a right to a final data export window. Missing data export rights is one of the most expensive mistakes a SaaS buyer can make.
How Scrutr's SaaS review differs from a lawyer's review
A lawyer reviewing a SaaS contract for a small business or startup typically charges $500–$2,000 and takes 3–7 days. The output is a memo of suggested changes. Scrutr produces the same risk analysis in 60 seconds, generates inline redlines, and drafts the negotiation email — for free on your first review, $9 per credit after that. For high-stakes enterprise contracts above $250K ARR, a lawyer is still appropriate. For the SaaS contracts most teams sign, Scrutr is what gets the review done at all.