Not great for employees either! Have worked for a startup such as this. Developers become part-time moderators/support for an audience which tends to be far les

Not great for employees either! Have worked for a startup such as this. Developers become part-time moderators/support for an audience which tends to be far less experienced than e.g. GitHub issues. Failing publicly becomes a daily occurrence, which is terrible for morale. Site outages and the like become unmanageable instances of highly unreasonable (often free-tier) outrage. You are basically eschewing the "wisdom" that even the giants like Google have realized which is that direct, accessible customer support for tech products doesn't scale and saying "yeah! our dev team of size 3 should be able to handle it right?" Just to be clear, I disagree with that notion. I just think you need to hire people to handle it and didn't have a say in such matters.