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Comment by mmaunder | Hacker News Reader

It is sad but true that users that pay less, or zero, are more demanding on customer support and make unreasonable demands via social. Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. Makes me regret having a free offering. In my 20 years doing software startups I’ve seen this over and over. Simply raising your prices, which we’ve raised to over 5x, dramatically reduces load on the CS team per dollar earned.

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The article says, "Counter-intuitively, the less the user pays the more likely they are to need your help", but that's not so counter-intuitive if you invert it.

Cheap users tend to be inexpert users. Expert users who really value your offering enough to pay more are those who understand why it's worth the money. They likely understand the problem or use that your work addresses, and they have enough knowledge to know which knobs to turn to use your product and be aware of the limits of what it can and should do.

A cheap user is more likely to be one who isn't very savvy, doesn't understand the scope and limitations of your product, and thus thinks it should solve more problems than it does, or to put it another way, 'be a dessert topping AND a floor wax'

Oddly, shellac is both a desert topping—it's sometimes used to make chocolates shiny—and a floor wax. Sorry for the tangent, I had to look this up, and was surprised.

I mean, it's also bug squeezins

It's funny that you mention experts use less support.

I work for an amazon subsidiary. We have free unlimited aws enterprise support. It's like pulling teeth for me to get our engineers to engage enterprise support. We know they have a ton of experience with triaging various aws tools and usage. Again we pay nothing for it, but one might consider we pay a massive amount for it as well. But we think we are experts on every system we touch.

Many of our issues would have been solved N days faster if we had just reached out to them immediately.

I would say we greatly over index on not bothering support.

Also once you deal with medium to large companies they will have an internal support team solve a lot of minor issues before it ever gets escalated to you.

Apart from those (I could name some medium and large financial services companies the following supplies to, but won't for obvious reasons) who officially have their own first-line support (and even try demand a per seat discount on that basis) but that support is useless: their idea of providing support is simply forwarding emails to us, no triage, no collation, no digging for extra information. Heck, sometimes they are worse than useless and make things worse, like not passing on some of the information the end user _did_ think to provide.

Not all are like this if course. But the proportion who are terrible is higher than you'd like.

I guess that is possible, I am only working with anecdotal evidence here. I have only ever seen the case where internal support handles most issues and less than a handful needs to be escalated to the vendor each year.

That is certainly how it should work, and in many cases it does.

We've had a couple on the dark side though. Perhaps because we are "too helpful" and actually, respond instead of forwarding on the support procedures documentation or pointing at the contract and coughing! Give 'em an inch, they'll take a foot, and before you know it you won't have a leg to stand on...

Expertise and company size aren't related, though, and I didn't mention it. There are ranges of expertise across large and small companies. Above a certain size, businesses are subject to the pathologies of the corporate world and can become real stinkers despite having money and (possibly sidelined) expertise.

>Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team.

If there's any consolation, people like this have near zero impact on the actual sales. Reasonable customers who research reviews are used to filtering out nutty feedback. So all you get is megabytes of virtual outrage from people that would have never bought your product in the first place.

I don't have any way of knowing how rational this is without running more experiments, but when I'm down to final selection between a few products, I search for "<product> sucks" on Google.

If the results seem fairly rational, I may have second thoughts about going that way. If the negative reviews come from people who seem unhinged, then the fact that they bubbled to the top is a good indication that only nutbars hate the project.

Call it hyperloglog as applied to counterarguments for a product.

My guess is part (not all) of this is due to people assuming that free offerings are already generating revenue in some fashion other than a direct payment (e.g., advertising for Google/Facebook), and thus they're still helping your business and entitled to support as much as anybody.

Whether the assumption is right or wrong for each business, it's not hard to see how we've gotten here.

This is correct in my experience. It also cuts deeper than just advertising or selling user data. It's the classic exposure argument. Give me the service for free and someone else might pay for it who hears about the service through my social network.

As discussed elsewhere in this thread, this line of thinking can even be completely reasonable for various services that have low costs associated with the free offering. It's when the free offering costs a significant amount to operate that you start running into trouble.

“ demanding we convert and rely on donations”

People whining for more is fairly normal. Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new.

Does everyone think most businesses are somehow ad supported?

> Does everyone think most businesses are somehow ad supported?

Not necessarily ads, but they might assume most businesses will monetize whatever info they get their hands on however they can. Especially so for free offerings ("you are the product" etc.).

The "you are the product" assumption alone is probably the strongest reason to never offer a free service.

Having all that "free" shit in app stores doesn't help. I wish Apple and Google would require apps to charge some minimum.

> Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new.

Nah, that behaviour has been around since before this millennium. They don't actual want it for everybody but they think they might get a better response if they look less self oriented.

"do what I want/need, not just for me you understand, but for the community"

Disable his account.

Reminds me of the seller that bricked some guys iot roller door after a bad review.

Presumably the guy with the roller door paid for it.

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