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Comment by sokoloff | Hacker News Reader

You got an unsatisfactory reply to a support ticket.

What's the realistic alternative with other software vendors of $20-50 products? IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no [edit to add: human-generated] reply".

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I sell a $10 app on the App Store and it sells quite well. My co-founder and I personally block time every evening to reply to support emails and interact with our users on discord. We could easily hire someone to handle support, but we derive a lot of pleasure and satisfaction from being able to deal with our users ourselves. Our users seem to like it too. And we couldn't care less about building in public. We build for ourselves and our users.

Responses like yours are always so strange to me. Perhaps I misunderstood your response but it feels very much like a defense of the status quo. As if the PC was expecting too much to get support for software they paid for and that their raising of the issue in the comment was unwarranted.

How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts everything that ever happens without complaint?

So many software devs seem to have this attitude that the customer (internal or external) should just shut up and be happy with whatever they've been given.

I've often felt that many devs could benefit from a stint waiting tables — where the customer is always right and your income is dependent on being helpful and responsive.

>How do things ever get better if everyone just accepts everything that ever happens without complaint?

I don't think this post is about making things better, it's about making money quickly.

It's not that it was unwarranted on the consumer's part, but rather that the common outcome of support (of no human reply) would have been not noteworthy, quickly forgotten, and probably not resulted in the upthread comment at all.

Instead, the case of having human-staffed support for a low-priced product that happens to have given an unhelpful reply to GP (but likely gave helpful replies to >50% of support cases [because most support questions are user-error]) drives home a negative [rather than null] feeling in the upthread consumer and results in the negative response above. (For avoidance of doubt, GP/consumer did nothing at all wrong then nor now. I'm talking about the incentives a company has to offer support at all for a low priced software product.)

I was able to get prompt and effective support from VoIP.ms, a company I pay something like $1.50/month. I once contacted Aruba support regarding hardware I bought secondhand and they replaced it for me. That many software companies choose to (and for some reason are permitted to) operate at scale beyond which they can meaningfully support their products doesn't mean that it's fundamentally impossible to receive support without paying a lot.

> IMO, the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no reply".

what point are you trying to make here? that he should shut up and be a good consumer? how dare he expect support from a product he paid for, from a guy making 500k a year, am I right?

The solution to receiving an unsatisfactory reply on a support ticket is not "lower your expectations", regardless of how that business may be structured.

If we lower our expectations of software, we'll get exactly that, shitty software.

Alternatively, you can speak their language so to speak, and request a refund/issue a chargeback. Sometimes that's the only way they'll understand

If you don’t like it you can always stop paying, or better yet build your own. That’s how things get better.

I stopped paying for Youtube Premium. Did that make Youtube better?

Maybe I'll find time to build that when I'm not building API integrations with Youtube.

If everyone thinks like this then no, it won't get better. But I stand by my statement, no matter how many downvotes I get. If you don't like a product, stop paying for it, and either find alternatives or build your own. Its quite rare that you're going to influence their roadmap by getting a ticket filed.

Don't you think it'd be a lot quicker if multiple people were filing a ticket for the same issue then to build the entire product yourself?

I could write many Series A angel checks if I only had a penny for all the tickets on product issues I've had that were never resolved.

It's for this reason if I find an NPM library that doesn't meet my needs and I have the time, I'll write a new one that solves only my use case.

If enough people stopped it might influence Youtube to change. Youtube is in the drivers seat. Some products change rapidly based on feedback and others never change. Youtube has the right to not make changes and not get your business back. If they make too many of these decisions and run out of money the will close. This is indirect.

You save by not paying for youtube. You paying someone else for similar services has a better return because your money endorses someone elses vision. When you buy a product you give a thumbs up. When you don't you don't give a thumbs down..

> the most common is not "a satisfactory reply" but rather "no reply".

No it isn't?

see, i just don't get this. one of my SaaS products is essentially 100% hands off (aside from occasional package upgrading, random refunds or upgrade issues every few weeks) but i still absolutely LOVE adding new features or fixing bug requests that customers bring into my view. it gives me the classic feeling of really helping someone, even if it is just a single individual out there.

then the bug reports start to get further and further apart... now i have had one in months :)

Yep, well it's clear how indexed on money Tony is in this post. Not passing judgment either way, but for some people software is just a means of making money. And that's okay.

Isn't more of a bug report than a support ticket ? I'd hate silence to be the standard response to bug reports.

Clean shot is exactly like xnapper but better in every single aspect

True that Cleanshot works well and was there before but I feel like it should be mentioned that the background feature was copied 1:1 from Xnapper from Tony.

I run such a product, I try to create an expectation that I read every email (I do), but I may not able to answer it, and I much prefer spending time fixing the actual bug or updating the UI or docs (which scales) to responding (which doesn't scale).

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