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Comment by lettersdigits | Hacker News Reader

>Nine years later, and still the stream of customer support requests has not relented!

You gave me an idea for a business model - Let's say you offer a pingdom-like service (to monitor your site availability and reliablity) -

You can just do the following:

1. Offer the service 100% Free, at your own risk

2. Offer a $x/month subscription . if you don't pay - you won't get any customer support.

Or, you can will still offer free support for non-paying customers, but without any priority (their tickets will be handled only after the paying customer's tickets)

Does anyone know of a company that is offering this type of model ?

(edit: added missing words and spacing)

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A lot of SaaS businesses offer priority support for paying customers.

As a SaaS founder — I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

It works better with the Red Hat model: "Here's some flawed buggy software I wrote. Pay me and I'll make it work for your use case."

There's a small incentive to write deliberately obscured code, but I think it gets outweighed by maintainability concerns.

Seems to be better known as the Sun/Oracle model.

And the Apache Model: Write awful, placeholder documentation, then get an O'Reilly book deal to finally explain yourself and your code.

> I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

Hmm. I think it makes sense if you begin with the assumption that all software is flawed and buggy by default.

Support doesnt mean broken software. Many times it's about how to use it correctly to solve a problem, and paying more for response times, customization and general level of work involved makes perfect sense.

It's a good idea, which is why it's common practice. Every Google Cloud service is set up this way, for instance.

This is a common model for commercial open source software.

pay cancel -> 1yr -> pay cancel.

Also, you'd be incentivizing your company to make support more complex so users call, email etc.

what ? please explain..

If you cancel the subscription, you won't get support. I don't understand your point :)

I think they are saying someone will pay for support, use it, then cancel the subscription. The assumption there is that you offer a refund for the service, which I don't think is necessary (Especially once they have used a support inquiry.)

Apple in-app subs let you "cancel" but only in the way of not paying for the next renewal, so it is a widely used model already.

> The assumption there is that you offer a refund for the service, which I don't think is necessary

exactly this. Just cancel his subscription the NEXT month, and you solved the problem, financially and technically :)

And who would HATE this proposition ? the spammers :) now they won't be able to do what the OP has suggested they might do (pay -> get support -> cancel ):)

(edit: spacing.

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