That's what it says, but in practice I've asked some really general and technical questions of AWS support and always received a helpful reply without a paid support plan as well. With a paid plan the response time is better.

In general the AWS support has been great. In many cases, they've forwarded our requests to product teams who have even fixed bugs we've run into and contacted us directly.

Our other experience is with paid Azure support, which did little else than direct us to the (not related to the question) docs. They also had a really hard time understanding our technical questions about specific APIs. To their credit, they did eventually escalate to the PM of the service in question.

In general, the team responsible for the service really must be able to help out with support requests. In AWS this is definitely the case, in Azure as well but there's a bit of gatekeeping. Does developers and PMs in GCP participate in support?