I've never worked for or with Franz, but I have worked support. The cost of supporting a customer is relatively uncorrelated with any of the typical ways of ch

I've never worked for or with Franz, but I have worked support. The cost of supporting a customer is relatively uncorrelated with any of the typical ways of charging for maintenance (e.g. per dev seat, company market-cap &c.). This leads to maintenance contracts that are very limited in scope. OTOH Companies really want a way to be guaranteed that you will support them. This often leads to some form of tiered support system. If you are not noisy, you can get away with a low tier. If you are noisy you'll be pushed to a higher tier. If you are rich and don't want to bother with that nonsense you just buy the top tier. Also there's a difference between "Thanks for the bug report, it will be fixed in the next release" and "Here's a patch against <whatever version you are using> 24 hours after we fixed it in our development branch". The former is free pretty much everywhere (bug reports are like free QA). The latter is going to cost money.