Welcome to the state of TOS in the payment services industry. I agree, it's pretty yucky, but every single upstream provider that Spreedly uses (PayPal, Authorize.net, etc.) has similar terms that are as or even more non-committal. Because of that, and because we're not in a position (yet?) to buck the trend, we've stuck with the party line for now. Even Shopify (http://shopify.com), who is perhaps even more critical to the businesses on their platform, has basically the same set of terms.

Now, while legally there's not much we can do, on a practical level we're a support-centric organization that totally understands that our clients are building their businesses on us and that we have to be reliable. Our income is directly tied to our clients income, so we have all kinds of incentive to make sure that the service is always up and ready to collect payment. Also, because of the way Spreedly works, you can quickly build a layer of simple caching in to your application that will ensure that even if we were down for some reason your site would still be up and serving existing clients.

I hope this helps explain. I know it's not the most satisfactory answer ever, but it's an honest one based on where we (and the industry) are at this point.