Contracts for support are mostly useless in any case when your service is down and you need to get a vendor to respond in a timely fashion. If they are in breac

Contracts for support are mostly useless in any case when your service is down and you need to get a vendor to respond in a timely fashion. If they are in breach of contract, you have no mechanism to force them into compliance in a short enough timeframe. I've been in situations several times where a vendor with a paid support contract just couldn't fix a problem fast enough and I was forced to dig into their product myself to figure out a fix. This is why everything you build your own product on and that can't be replaced in a matter of hours by a competing product should come with source. Worst-case scenario, you fix the issue in source yourself.