There isn’t a single business in existence that cares about you. Even companies in the business of keeping you alive will only do so while doing so makes them a profit.
I say this as the example of the local handyman is one where you will matter more. It’s a human relationship with a real person not a fake relationship with one person and a spreadsheet
I'll go in the other direction. With a few exceptions, it is unfortunately true that "a business" isn't just "a way to make money," it's VERY OFTEN "the only reasonable way to accomplish a big-ish goal involving multiple people."
I say this as someone who started a business incidentally, my father had a big project that he and I loved the idea of, and I knew I could put together a good team to do the web part of it, and so I did. Money was NOT the primary motivator.
Edit: worker owned coops don’t have this issue because they are definitionally managed from the bottom up.
Additional edit: the “you” in my post is doing heavy lifting I mean both the post I replied to and the one directly above it.
The motivation for starting a project/business is very rarely going to be the priority for said business’s survival if it reaches a large enough audience.
That’s just an inevitability of scale — the larger the audience, the harder to focus on one member of said audience and the less any one single member of said audience matters.
Maybe loyalty is the wrong word - if they really go to left field, I would abandon them.
But I have a lot of faith in their design decisions and overall vision. Their software works, continues to work, and has always worked amazingly for me.
I also feel the same way about Firefox but donating to Firefox isn't like donating to thunderbird.
Restaurant owner friend transferred his company to new ownership, and I would never ask for the kinds of goodies the previous owner gave me. Because it was the owner, not the company, with which I had a relationship.
Reading aye…