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It is sad but true that users that pay less, or zero, are more demanding on customer support and make unreasonable demands via social. Had a guy this week using

It is sad but true that users that pay less, or zero, are more demanding on customer support and make unreasonable demands via social. Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. Makes me regret having a free offering. In my 20 years doing software startups I’ve seen this over and over. Simply raising your prices, which we’ve raised to over 5x, dramatically reduces load on the CS team per dollar earned.

dataflow 6y ago
My guess is part (not all) of this is due to people assuming that free offerings are already generating revenue in some fashion other than a direct payment (e.g., advertising for Google/Facebook), and thus they're still helping your business and entitled to support as much as anybody. Whether the assumption is right or wrong for each business, it's not hard to see how we've gotten here.
- Strom 6y ago
  This is correct in my experience. It also cuts deeper than just advertising or selling user data. It's the classic exposure argument. Give me the service for free and someone else might pay for it who hears about the service through my social network. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, this line of thinking can even be completely reasonable for various services that have low costs associated with the free offering. It's when the free offering costs a significant amount to operate that you start running into trouble.
MattGaiser 6y ago
“ demanding we convert and rely on donations” People whining for more is fairly normal. Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new. Does everyone think most businesses are somehow ad supported?
- dataflow 6y ago
  > Does everyone think most businesses are somehow ad supported? Not necessarily ads, but they might assume most businesses will monetize whatever info they get their hands on however they can. Especially so for free offerings ("you are the product" etc.).
  - ben509 6y ago
    The "you are the product" assumption alone is probably the strongest reason to never offer a free service.
- phkahler 6y ago
  Having all that "free" shit in app stores doesn't help. I wish Apple and Google would require apps to charge some minimum.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new. Nah, that behaviour has been around since before this millennium. They don't actual want it for everybody but they think they might get a better response if they look less self oriented. "do what I want/need, not just for me you understand, but for the community"
cratermoon 6y ago
The article says, "Counter-intuitively, the less the user pays the more likely they are to need your help", but that's not so counter-intuitive if you invert it. Cheap users tend to be inexpert users. Expert users who really value your offering enough to pay more are those who understand why it's worth the money. They likely understand the problem or use that your work addresses, and they have enough knowledge to know which knobs to turn to use your product and be aware of the limits of what it can and should do. A cheap user is more likely to be one who isn't very savvy, doesn't understand the scope and limitations of your product, and thus thinks it should solve more problems than it does, or to put it another way, 'be a dessert topping AND a floor wax'
- webstrand 6y ago
  Oddly, shellac is both a desert topping—it's sometimes used to make chocolates shiny—and a floor wax. Sorry for the tangent, I had to look this up, and was surprised.
  - cratermoon 6y ago
    I mean, it's also bug squeezins
- grogenaut 6y ago
  It's funny that you mention experts use less support. I work for an amazon subsidiary. We have free unlimited aws enterprise support. It's like pulling teeth for me to get our engineers to engage enterprise support. We know they have a ton of experience with triaging various aws tools and usage. Again we pay nothing for it, but one might consider we pay a massive amount for it as well. But we think we are experts on every system we touch. Many of our issues would have been solved N days faster if we had just reached out to them immediately. I would say we greatly over index on not bothering support.
- chillfox 6y ago
  Also once you deal with medium to large companies they will have an internal support team solve a lot of minor issues before it ever gets escalated to you.
dempseye 6y ago
Disable his account.
- qwertay 6y ago
  Reminds me of the seller that bricked some guys iot roller door after a bad review.
  - dempseye 6y ago
    Presumably the guy with the roller door paid for it.
john_moscow 6y ago
>Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. If there's any consolation, people like this have near zero impact on the actual sales. Reasonable customers who research reviews are used to filtering out nutty feedback. So all you get is megabytes of virtual outrage from people that would have never bought your product in the first place.
- hinkley 6y ago
  I don't have any way of knowing how rational this is without running more experiments, but when I'm down to final selection between a few products, I search for "<product> sucks" on Google. If the results seem fairly rational, I may have second thoughts about going that way. If the negative reviews come from people who seem unhinged, then the fact that they bubbled to the top is a good indication that only nutbars hate the project. Call it hyperloglog as applied to counterarguments for a product.

dataflow 6y ago

My guess is part (not all) of this is due to people assuming that free offerings are already generating revenue in some fashion other than a direct payment (e.g., advertising for Google/Facebook), and thus they're still helping your business and entitled to support as much as anybody. Whether the assumption is right or wrong for each business, it's not hard to see how we've gotten here.

Strom 6y ago
This is correct in my experience. It also cuts deeper than just advertising or selling user data. It's the classic exposure argument. Give me the service for free and someone else might pay for it who hears about the service through my social network. As discussed elsewhere in this thread, this line of thinking can even be completely reasonable for various services that have low costs associated with the free offering. It's when the free offering costs a significant amount to operate that you start running into trouble.

MattGaiser 6y ago

“ demanding we convert and rely on donations” People whining for more is fairly normal. Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new. Does everyone think most businesses are somehow ad supported?

dataflow 6y ago
> Does everyone think most businesses are somehow ad supported? Not necessarily ads, but they might assume most businesses will monetize whatever info they get their hands on however they can. Especially so for free offerings ("you are the product" etc.).
- ben509 6y ago
  The "you are the product" assumption alone is probably the strongest reason to never offer a free service.
phkahler 6y ago
Having all that "free" shit in app stores doesn't help. I wish Apple and Google would require apps to charge some minimum.
dspillett 6y ago
> Wanting it for everyone in perpetuity is new. Nah, that behaviour has been around since before this millennium. They don't actual want it for everybody but they think they might get a better response if they look less self oriented. "do what I want/need, not just for me you understand, but for the community"

cratermoon 6y ago

The article says, "Counter-intuitively, the less the user pays the more likely they are to need your help", but that's not so counter-intuitive if you invert it. Cheap users tend to be inexpert users. Expert users who really value your offering enough to pay more are those who understand why it's worth the money. They likely understand the problem or use that your work addresses, and they have enough knowledge to know which knobs to turn to use your product and be aware of the limits of what it can and should do. A cheap user is more likely to be one who isn't very savvy, doesn't understand the scope and limitations of your product, and thus thinks it should solve more problems than it does, or to put it another way, 'be a dessert topping AND a floor wax'

webstrand 6y ago
Oddly, shellac is both a desert topping—it's sometimes used to make chocolates shiny—and a floor wax. Sorry for the tangent, I had to look this up, and was surprised.
- cratermoon 6y ago
  I mean, it's also bug squeezins
grogenaut 6y ago
It's funny that you mention experts use less support. I work for an amazon subsidiary. We have free unlimited aws enterprise support. It's like pulling teeth for me to get our engineers to engage enterprise support. We know they have a ton of experience with triaging various aws tools and usage. Again we pay nothing for it, but one might consider we pay a massive amount for it as well. But we think we are experts on every system we touch. Many of our issues would have been solved N days faster if we had just reached out to them immediately. I would say we greatly over index on not bothering support.
chillfox 6y ago
Also once you deal with medium to large companies they will have an internal support team solve a lot of minor issues before it ever gets escalated to you.

dempseye 6y ago

Disable his account.

qwertay 6y ago
Reminds me of the seller that bricked some guys iot roller door after a bad review.
- dempseye 6y ago
  Presumably the guy with the roller door paid for it.

john_moscow 6y ago

>Had a guy this week using our free product that has 90% of the paid products features berating us on Twitter for not being 100% free and demanding we convert and rely on donations to support our 40 person team. If there's any consolation, people like this have near zero impact on the actual sales. Reasonable customers who research reviews are used to filtering out nutty feedback. So all you get is megabytes of virtual outrage from people that would have never bought your product in the first place.

hinkley 6y ago
I don't have any way of knowing how rational this is without running more experiments, but when I'm down to final selection between a few products, I search for "<product> sucks" on Google. If the results seem fairly rational, I may have second thoughts about going that way. If the negative reviews come from people who seem unhinged, then the fact that they bubbled to the top is a good indication that only nutbars hate the project. Call it hyperloglog as applied to counterarguments for a product.