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Comment by ipsento606 | Hacker News Reader

> The machine was jammed. It wasn’t a big deal. I shrugged and moved on to buy my groceries.

I resonate with the sentiment, but this is very far from my experience selling cheap software products.

I had multiple people reach out to me because a software upgrade they paid $2 for 8 years ago stopped working. And they were, like, pissed about it.

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This is my parents and my in-laws. They will gladly tip a bartender $5 for pouring a beer but God forbid you suggest they spend $2 on a productivity app on the app store.

Probably because while they paid $2 for it, it was worth far more than $2 to them.

I run a free website with a monthly active user count in the 100k range. When something breaks - even if it's a really niche feature or a compatibility issue with an outdated browser - I get an army of furious users contacting me however they can. I can't imagine what would happen to me if the site completely broke or went down for more than a few hours.

Charge for support emails. $1 (or whatever) to fill out a form and have a support email delivered to you. All other support emails (presumably to old addresses) will be ignored.

You can choose not to engage. What are they going to do, fire you?

That sucks, but with the stakes as low as $2, I'd happily give the money back and move on.

trying to refund a transaction that occurred 8 years ago is actually pretty onerous and time consuming

if someone relies on an upgrade for 8 years, $2 is not enough!

You should be able to pay for upgrades and not hve to ply russin roulette where there's any chance that updating removes features and puts them back behind an eternal subscriber paywall.

I guess the idea is to not provide contacts and to explicitly claim this position in the user agreement. How much pissed they are may really depend on how much of it is allowed. Some can kick the machine, but in this case it will be their pc.

> I guess the idea is to not provide contacts and to explicitly claim this position in the user agreement.

Unfortunately, that is becoming increasingly harder.

https://developer.apple.com/help/app-store-connect/manage-co...

Before the inevitable victim blaming of “don’t do business with that platform/jurisdiction/whatever”, please remember to be empathetic and that not everyone has the same choices you do. I’m in no way defending this, just pointing out the state of affairs.

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