Why would you walk away from a piano that's working fine and cost you 180 bucks to fix? I gotta push back on the idea that you messed up here. Cracked soundboards are way more common than people think, especially on old cheap uprights, and lots of them get shimmed or glued and just keep going for years. Wood moves, cracks happen, you fix it and move on. The real issue is your apartment humidity, so grab a cheap hygrometer and maybe a small room humidifier in winter, because that's what made it spread. You didn't get scammed, you got a 400 dollar piano that plays, which is honestly a decent deal.

So when you say the SLA was "really just a hope, not a plan," what did the new version actually look like on paper? Like did you start quoting 8 hours instead of 2, or did you split it into tiers where the crash type stuff gets a longer window than a password reset? I keep seeing people slap a number on the contract because it wins the deal, then quietly eat the overage every time something breaks at scale. Curious if you spelled out what counts as a real emergency versus a normal ticket, since a Monday server crash is not the same animal as someone asking where the invoice PDF is. Did the Chicago thing make you drop the guarantee altogether or just widen it?