This is one of those classic "caught in the middle" problems. Small companies won't be able to afford decent support contracts, big companies will vertically in

This is one of those classic "caught in the middle" problems. Small companies won't be able to afford decent support contracts, big companies will vertically integrate by developing/hiring in-house expertise. The last place I worked was a medium-sized software company (60 people, $xx mil ARR) and we paid about $8k/month for MongoDB's enterprise support (generally quite good) as well as for AWS Enterprise support, which provided faster escalations when getting limits raised (EBS sizes/counts, EC2 instance counts, etc), as well as advance notice of upcoming features and architectural guidance on building our app. I probably wouldn't pay for AWS's service again, to be honest it feels like Amazon built it because bigco enterprise wants to pay for support, whatever diagnosis they did invariably pointed right back at our own configuration/operational error when dealing with AWS (gotta love those security group rules...) I've long wanted a service where we could sponsor roadmap items for open-source projects. Not sure how putting $ into the equation would interact with an existing open-source product roadmap, but it's de facto what happens today, when fb/yahoo/etc. staff projects with their own developers, who they pay to develop features relevant to their own businesses.