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Comment by kelnos | Hacker News Reader

Why should you need a support plan for a product you're paying for?

"Ok, you can pay us $X/mo for the service, but if something goes wrong, we won't help you unless you also pay an additional $Y/mo."

It's absolute garbage that this is where the industry is.

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Why is it bad to give the option to not pay for support you don't want? If they didn't charge separately for it, that means the cost is distributed to everyone in terms of higher costs for the service itself.

If you think support is always necessary, then just do the math yourself and add in the cost of support for every product, and use that price to determine if it is worth it or not.

Because some businesses want support, and others don't. Forcing the people who don't want support to pay for support seems rude, does it not?

This is consumer thinking, not business thinking. Every high ticket item on the planet comes with the option of a support contract.

Because the product that you're paying for is an extremely efficient automated cloud infrastructure with little manual support, unless you're willing to pay more for it. If you want hand holding there are other less automated infrastructure providers that cost a lot more.

I don't know, lot's of tech enterprises will give you the product for free and make it up on "support". Fortunately, a lot of these environments have forums and such which means you will eventually get help, but not soon enough if your hair is on fire.

Yes, my 100$ monthly spend deserves the same support as a company with a $250,000 monthly spend.

Indeed, but once growth stops, they have increase revenue somehow.

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