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> The thing that's crazy is that the cost to the SaaS provider has nothing to do with the number of users. Surely their support costs scale with the number of

> The thing that's crazy is that the cost to the SaaS provider has nothing to do with the number of users. Surely their support costs scale with the number of users? This might explain some anti-growth behaviors, support is expensive and a lot of companies struggle to get it right.

user5994461 6y ago
Support costs has no relation to number of users. It's constant time O(10) in engineering speech. It doesn't increase going from 100 to 500 to 2000 users, because none of these users can raise support requests to the vendor. It's only the person (or micro team) who did the product evaluation and drafted the contract who has contact to the vendor support and sales team.
- apatters 6y ago
  I'm not convinced. Even if only one person at the company has access to support, he's going to have more people asking him to submit tickets about their problems when there are 2,000 users vs 100.
  - user5994461 6y ago
    This doesn't happen in practice because the 1900 more employees do not know who is that person and couldn't figure it out even if their life depended on it. If you've worked in any large organization, above one thousand employees, doesn't matter how many above really. For any specific system, there are often only 1-3 people who are familiar with it and have access and would be willing to touch it. There will be a few tens other employees who knows about them and have half a clue what they do (typically same department or neighbors sitting nearby). If one of those hear you looking for help on X, they can direct you "oh I think it's managed by that guy". The other 1900+ can't help you. Having been the unlucky developer at work trying to track down whom to forward a ticket through (100k employees), for both internal services and external vendors. It's not uncommon that it takes weeks to find the one person. There are quite a few I've never found.
    - apatters 6y ago
      Very interesting insights
- ghiculescu 6y ago
  This might be true in enterprise SaaS (even then it's risky) but not in small/medium business. Particularly if you are using Intercom etc in your product - it's expected that you'll allow any user to contact you. So yes, support can grow as user counts grow. But it shouldn't be a major expense (if it is that's a product failure).

user5994461 6y ago

Support costs has no relation to number of users. It's constant time O(10) in engineering speech. It doesn't increase going from 100 to 500 to 2000 users, because none of these users can raise support requests to the vendor. It's only the person (or micro team) who did the product evaluation and drafted the contract who has contact to the vendor support and sales team.

apatters 6y ago
I'm not convinced. Even if only one person at the company has access to support, he's going to have more people asking him to submit tickets about their problems when there are 2,000 users vs 100.
- user5994461 6y ago
  This doesn't happen in practice because the 1900 more employees do not know who is that person and couldn't figure it out even if their life depended on it. If you've worked in any large organization, above one thousand employees, doesn't matter how many above really. For any specific system, there are often only 1-3 people who are familiar with it and have access and would be willing to touch it. There will be a few tens other employees who knows about them and have half a clue what they do (typically same department or neighbors sitting nearby). If one of those hear you looking for help on X, they can direct you "oh I think it's managed by that guy". The other 1900+ can't help you. Having been the unlucky developer at work trying to track down whom to forward a ticket through (100k employees), for both internal services and external vendors. It's not uncommon that it takes weeks to find the one person. There are quite a few I've never found.
  - apatters 6y ago
    Very interesting insights
ghiculescu 6y ago
This might be true in enterprise SaaS (even then it's risky) but not in small/medium business. Particularly if you are using Intercom etc in your product - it's expected that you'll allow any user to contact you. So yes, support can grow as user counts grow. But it shouldn't be a major expense (if it is that's a product failure).