Being a HPC sysadmin, I was in a similar kind of situation. More often than not I get crazy requests for implementation + dev + debug support. This started to s

Being a HPC sysadmin, I was in a similar kind of situation. More often than not I get crazy requests for implementation + dev + debug support. This started to severely interfere with my other attributions so I decided to change things. 1/ Set a strict line in the support provided: I'm happy to give a hand as long as it is mail support and whenever I have the time to reply. No direct interaction with the user code whatsoever. Otherwise we agree on a number of hours I would spend on this and they would be charged for it. 2/ Use the liberated time to set up a knowledge base: Currently I've set up a wiki, a FAQ and I'm giving free courses (101 + good practices). I try to keep everything up-to-date by adding the questions/answers I get to it. It was not easy especially at first (convince someone non tech-savvy that their model was at fault when the error logs displays 1 error coming from the model and 80 coming from MPI processes was quite hard) but now in about 80% of the requests you could see they've started looking for stuff by themselves before contacting me. Which is really pleasant! In your particular case I would involve the customer support in the documentation writing (at least a FAQ) so that they actually see how painful and time consuming it is to write those things. On the dev side, the technical documentation should have some good practices nuggets here and there, for example in the part where you explain server cnnection by showing the actual command line to use you could add a comment like "#connection using hostname to keep it IP independent". Which might lead a couple of newbies and junior dev to the right path. On API level ideally it should enforce good practices by enforcing more strict rules (connection only possible using hostname f.e.). But as soon as you actually touch the system or machine of the client you should at least be legally covered. And given the set of skills involved and how the time spent here won't be available somewhere else they also should be charged for it.