I follow a different strategy. I took over a migration for a multi-million visitor news portal. The person who handed the site over to me architected it so poor

I follow a different strategy. I took over a migration for a multi-million visitor news portal. The person who handed the site over to me architected it so poorly and didn't really share the full details and as a result the migration blew and lead to downtime of about 20 minutes. The client hated me for that. Over the course of the next 3 months, I went over the board to win them back, provided them WhatsApp support and made sure things are re-architected to be more cost efficient and stable. Since then, they've been able to handle 10x the traffic since my engagement with them for the same flat cost. Their competitors are paying easily 5-6x the cost in 1000s of dollars per month. A few weeks ago, the client even offered me to become a CTO in their company. Obviously, as a consultant I value loyalty and so I politely declined. I even handle all their technology side of things, short of being an official CTO. It's one of my greatest success stories and at the same time, it helped me understand that behind all those angry calls, texts, etc. is a frustrated PERSON who needs just emotional confrontation. It's not possible to do this at scale, but, if you only have 1 or 2 bad apples, you can use them to your advantage to gather feedback to improve your product or service. From the author's note, if I paid for a lifetime service, it doesn't mean you're doing me a favor. I'm simply paying what you told me your service is worth. And if you treat me bad because I asked you to fix your broken stuff, that's just so unprofessional. If I asked you for more stuff than what the original product's scope is, you can simply let me know your consulting rates and that is almost like a small investor paying you money to build a feature for your product that's probably useful for other customers as well.