I started off reading this article thinking "well, anyone who has ever maintained an open source project has almost certainly experienced the unending entitlement of users even when working for free". But after reading the article, I'm not surprised your users dislike you more after communicating with them...
> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.
> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.
> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.
> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!
> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.
> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.
Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.
> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email
Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.
You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.
As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.
I agree his responses could be more compassionate and show more effort, but i feel your characterization is over-critical. There _isnt time_ to chase bugs that aren’t reproducible. The software _cant_ have every form factor, _some things_ need to be set in stone as a North Star. These aren’t scummy practices, these are realities of a time-bounded existence.
Thanks for reading. I'm not sure what you think is scummy unless it's just having a subscription? If so, you are going to love my next article on how subscription apps are the best invention ever and the only business model that makes sense! Definitely subscribe so you don't miss that one.
The thing you have to remember is that there are thousands of products out there all trying to charge a subscription, and most people aren't going to justify taking on more than a very small handful of them at any time. Plus (not directed at you specifically, just in general), your product almost certainly isn't as good or as important to the customer as you think it is unless you've genuinely identified some niche nobody else is operating in, of you have an exceptionally polished product with few competitors.
People are however consistently willing to regularly make one-off purchases to get something they can "own". I've bought way more lifetime licenses for software than I've taken out subscriptions. When you consider that nobody stays subscribed for life, there's always a number that you can charge for lifetime which is in fact functionally equivalent to a subscription anyway.
> You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products.
This was the biggest (1) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off?
Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered by an expert? That's an unrealistic expectation, but I guess now you know.
Or was it that you really thought that customers would be happy if you just took the time to explain your pricing model to them (also unrealistic).
It is kind of obvious from the types of emails you get, and the types of responses you give that it was not going to lead to strong customer relationships. If all you're doing is writing a 100 words to say "No, I'm not going to do what you want" that's not going to make things better.
(1) Actually 2nd biggest - the biggest was talking about "buying Castro" but having no explanation/links about who the author is, what Castro is, or how/when/why it was bought.
It’s for these reasons LLMs are going to chip away at silly subscriptions. When many projects get 70% of what the user needs and the maintainers aren’t willing or able to address what paying customers want…why bother paying anymore when you’ll soon be able to have just those bespoke features/fixes/integrations built yourself?
It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.
One suggestion — when you have an unsatisfying answer for a customer like “I can’t reproduce that”, or “I won’t build that feature”, the customer may not appreciate the amount of effort you have invested in that decision. A 30 minute phone call/video call may communicate more effectively the depth of care you have. Even if you convey the same information, people _love_ talking to the owner/founder, it is a very strong indication that you care about their thoughts.
Making a phone call might be effective at times. However, I don’t think simply making a call will solve the problem.
Once a customer makes a phone call, they’ll feel compelled to call every time. That will be burden on the support staff.
Even with email, simply striving to provide prompt and reliable responses shows that you’re putting the customer first.
Indeed a helpful article for it's detailed insights. Once you think about alternatives, it's clear why everyone else is on the well-known path (such as unhelpful support.)
I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."
When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.
People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.
> People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill
It's rarely 0.03 though in my experience. More like 10 a month or even more between the cheap options with bad support and the better ones. Even if you have one issue every year (sounds high to me), that's over a hundred per support phone call. Makes you think twice about the trade-offs.
Thinking about customer support as a ‘differentiator’ or a way to drive profit is depressing. You should simply strive to do what’s best for your customers. The sort of feedback you’re getting is golden and in the right hands can be put to use rather than be dismissed. Assuming that people who disagree with your pricing model just don’t understand how business works is really telling. You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...
The comment is basically doing exactly what it accused OP of doing: behaving as if the commenter has "singularly thought through every problem in an armchair" and knows better than OP who actually tried doing it.
Could be an armchair, could be a toilet, either seems a reasonable standard for a commenter on a messageboard, are we expecting a focus group or something?
Why exactly? "Error logging" is mentioned there as an alternative. I would have thought that if you can do telemetry you ought to be able to generate a local log file that is readable enough for the customer to feel confident about sending part of it back to you without breaking the law or their contracts with other parties.
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.
There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.
Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.
> you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you
There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.
Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
We like to think of physical products as one offs where what you buy tomorrow is the same as what you buy today.
But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.
We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.
What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.
Can the same not be found for many software products?
To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.
> What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited... Can the same not be found for many software products?
Some of the enterprise software I've worked on has an option that functions this way. You pay for a specific version which is supported for a few years. You can keep using it forever but if you want to keep getting security updates or live support then you'll have to buy a newer version that is still in its support window.
Having said that, it seems like most businesses seem to prefer subscriptions.
Depends though what you pay for the one-time price. You can pay an offline version of the application (no extra costs afterwards), or a limited period of SaaS application updates (let's say 3 years).
I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.
For the majority of software I use, I don't really care about continuous upgrades and new features, as long as it works with the feature set I signed up for.
A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which isn't already in the app. I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for the work the developers have done up to that point. I'm definitely not happy to add another $5 a month to my pile of subscriptions.
For me the boundary is this: (1) If I get something of value every month (e.g. use of a cloud server, or something which obviously needs regular updating like Netflix) -> subscription justified; (2) If I just want to use what I can already see in the app -> very unlikely I'll ever subscribe unless the product is absolutely essential to me and there are no competitors.
A good example of the latter is Skritter. I don't care about new functionality, but there literally isn't another app which can do what it does, so I pay the subscription.
The biggest tension between software and one-off purchases is related to bugfixing, and especially security. It makes sense that you don't expect new features for a product that you paid for once. But, what is the case with bugs? If the product mostly does what it promised to do, but sometimes crashes, do you expect those crashes to be fixed for your version, or not? What it you're using a 10-year old version and a new critical (say, unauthenticated remote execution) vulnerability is found in it? Do you expect to get it resolved as part of the price you originally paid, or would you be ok with being told you have to buy a new version if you want this ?
There's some merit to your arguments, but not enough to justify a subscription:
- Subscriptions are marketed as being a lot more than just bugfixes - new features being the big one. But there's usually no cheaper "bugfix-only" subscription, which means that someone who doesn't care about new features has to pay for them anyway.
- To be honest - yes, I do expect bugfixes for free if I've paid to buy the product. After all, a bug is a defect, and products are usually sold with the expectation that they will be fit for purpose. That's the principle which applies to physical consumer products, so why should it be any different for software? If I bought software that calculates my taxes for me, and it turns out a bug means that it applies the wrong tax rules, then I haven't got what I paid for. Why am I expected to pay every month just to make my software do what it was supposed to do in the first place?
- The developer is still incentivised to fix bugs in order to attract new purchasers.
- Subscriptions aren't a magic solution financially anyway, because there's an average limit to how long a customer stays subscribed for.
Heck, I'd pay to explicitly not get the new features and only get the security and bug fixes in several cases. The "new" features is in some cases just a reshuffling of the UI and removal of features I actually do use.
How do manufacturers of physical products handle defects? Aren't they obligated to correct defects through recalls and similar mechanisms? I don't see why software wouldn't work similarly.
Not always, it depends on the defect. There are many, many design defects that do not significantly impact the working of the device that will not get repaired, but would usually be patched in regular software (especially for visual design or bad UX like a literal rough edge on a physical product). Recalls in particular are very rare - they generally only happen for very serious faults, usually those that affect the safety of the device.
Also note that expectations can vary quite a bit between physical and software products. For an example, my vacuum cleaner fairly often shuts down if I stop and re-start it too soon. If this happened with an app, I would certainly consider it a pretty ugly bug, and might ask when they plan to fix it. But I would never consider sending the vacuum cleaner to a service station to try and get rid of it - and I think there is little chance they could fix it even if I did.
That's fine. It's my choice whether to upgrade my OS or not. If I do so, and my app no longer works on the new OS, then I can purchase a new version. Why should I pay a monthly fee just in case I might upgrade my OS and just in case the app doesn't work there?
Also, it's far less likely than you're suggesting that I would need the exact major OS version I started with. The majority of apps survive an OS upgrade just fine. In my case, I use NixOS, so that isn't even an issue at all since every package can have all of its dependencies frozen for as long as you like, even with a new major OS version.
As you have demonstrated with this comment, customers don’t really understand that there’s no such thing as “the product is done and costs are no longer incurred” even if the product is 100% done, and this is especially true on commercial app stores.
It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.
It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)
It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)
It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.
A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).
There are plenty of businesses that have all that overhead and still sell things instead of subscriptions.
Flip this argument around: you go buy a rake at the hardware store. They tell you they need to charge $5 a month for as long as you want to use it since they have to pay for a phone and website, no apple fee, but their city business license is more than that, etc.
Precisely no one will take that deal. If the store wants to stay in business they must continue to sell more products. It’s not my responsibility to keep paying them for a product so they can have a phone line.
If you are selling an app that has a service backing it or are providing support and updates, fine. Try to sell it as a subscription. If you are selling an app that runs entirely on my device? Version it. If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development, create a new version that has something I would want to pay for.
I think that for the physical store example the overhead is already included in the object price, and probably a significant part of it.
> If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development
My recollection with the status of 20-30 years ago is that people would sell you buggy applications for huge amounts of money and then you would be on your own. Doing good applications, without bugs, supported on multiple platforms and multiple use-cases is very expensive and takes time. Not sure what was your experience with pay once and just use the app, maybe it was better...
The benefit of subscriptions is that everybody has more flexibility. The developers can work continuously on the application. The customers can already use it for less than a one time (very large price) and see if it fits their needs and can change their mind if things don't go in the right direction.
The problem is that you’re not really making the right analogy. For one thing, the hardware store isn’t staying in business because you bought a rake once that you’ll never buy again. They’re making money on the contractors coming in and repeatedly buying things like paint and drywall. They’re making money on you buying light bulbs, dish soap, and mulch every year for the rest of your life.
When you really think about all the things a hardware store sells, not a lot of it lasts forever.
As a customer I’m totally all for buy-once and FOSS software. But I recognize that it’s not always the economic reality.
There’s plenty of buy-once iOS software out there. I’m definitely not saying that developers can’t do it, merely that I don’t blame the ones who go subscription-based, and that a lot of customers don’t realize the ongoing costs associated with publishing an iOS app.
The hardware store isn’t a perfect analogy, but my grandpas hammer has yet to reach EOL. Hardware stores are FULL of profitable items that you only buy once, or are you replacing your toilets on a monthly basis? Pick a different store if it bothers you that the hardware store also sells consumables. Plenty of businesses that exist to sell you a product or service once and count on no repeat business. The jeweler I bought my wife’s engagement ring from is not expecting me to buy another. He’s quite successful still despite having to cover the overhead of running a workshop and storefront.
I’m not blaming the ones who go subscription based. I endorsed it as a model when it makes sense (when you are providing a service inherent to the product, eg.). Developing the next version of your software doesn’t qualify as a service in my mind.
I’m complaining about software that goes subscription based completely unnecessarily. Adobe is the perfect example. There is no reason I shouldn’t be able to just buy photoshop. That worked fine for decades. I don’t need a subscription to MS Word, either. What new development has happened in text editing since autosave was added a few decades ago?
I can still play my original copy of Half Life, and valve is doing fantastic selling software instead of subscriptions. Arguably they are one of the biggest and most loved by consumers for that.
> there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions
This is clearly incorrect given that there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.
On a lower level, all that matters is the numbers. If your average customer stays subscribed for 24 months, then charging a lifetime fee equal to 24 months is equivalent to a subscription model. At that point it's irrelevant what's "sustainable" since 24 months is the max you can expect to charge on average anyway.
> there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.
There's a big difference between software you buy, run on your computer, and don't expect to be constantly updated, vs. an online service that you expect to stay up and serve you new content forever. In the latter case, if a customer drops off after 24 months, that lowers your costs. You can't reasonably charge a user for the number of months they could potentially remain subscribed.
> Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
The gambling goes both ways. Your $1 subscription price is betting that you can convince each user to keep on paying that subscription forever, their $24 lifetime price is betting that customers are going to churn after a year on average.
Your gamble is perhaps slightly safer, in the sense that if subscriptions fall so too do the ongoing costs. But there is a floor to costs (i.e. you need to keep paying your team), so both approaches are pretty dependent on the sales funnel bringing in new subscribers
It’s sustainable at $1/month at current costs, but those costs will go up over time. The subscription price could be raised accordingly but they can’t go back and ask for an inflation adjustment from people who bought it.
But that's a gamble! That's exactly my point. Someone is betting on something. How long the customer will stay, how long the software will be maintained and available, etc.
Maybe tomorrow my competitor will aggressively cut prices. Maybe the product line I've spent money developing won't sell well. Maybe that new machine I've invested in won't be as productive as the marketing materials promised. Maybe bad weather will mean my customers stay home instead of visiting my shop. Maybe a war on the other side of the planet will raise my material costs and empty my customers' wallets. Maybe the artist headlining my music festival won't be allowed to enter the country. Maybe 10 years into its 50 year life my nuclear power plant will be undercut by falling costs for solar. Maybe Google will make the thing my app does a native feature of their OS. Maybe we pushed the envelope too far or didn't test thoroughly enough and we'll be buried in warranty claims.
This risk is why investments in businesses pay more than treasury bonds.
If you aren't comfortable with that, entrepreneurship might not be right for you - nothing wrong with being an employee and getting the certainty of a monthly salary.
$1/day forever is around $9125 using the safe drawdown rate of 4% per year.
So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).
Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)
So there always is a price where that is financially viable.
I remember an article in Byte magazine circa 1982 or so which talked about how the software business sucks because it goes like
(1) Raise capital and spend a year developing a product
(2) Release the product, make a certain amount of money, then revenue dries up
(3) Pay yourself a bit and feed the rest of the money into develop version 2.0
(4) A year later it is struggle to sell version 2.0 because you're not just competing with applications from other people you are competing with your old 1.0, your most satisfied customers might be the least likely to upgrade
And that assumes development for 2.0 goes according to plan! As a software developer who gets a paycheck my life is easier working on a subscription based project my life is easier because management is not facing a financial crisis because a project is running a few months late.
As a customer though I often like paying ahead and I've been through a few cycles like this with Plex. Like I see the lifetime offering from Plex and I have the money now and it looks like a good deal... Then two years later they come up with something that really alienates me (that FAST service) and I hate being pushed into something I want nothing to deal with. So I go to Jellyfin and it is a godawful mess that I never get working quite right, just watching a movie with family and friends becomes an exercise in humiliation.
And I'm thinking... I don't have the option of exit [1] because I can't cancel my Plex pass! If on the other hand I was paying for a monthly subscription they are motivated to care what I think [2]
Now funny I had this summer when I was trying to gentle a stray cat [3] in a room in the other house and wound up watching a lot of Tubi, came to the conclusion FAST wasn't so bad, switched back to Plex, got a monthly subscription, and I am highly satisfied.
[2] I hate to be this way but when I have trouble w/ amazon I write to jeff@amazon.com and point out that it makes no sense to screw me for $20 because I have a say in at least $2M NPV of AWS cloud spending, when you consider a Prime subscription and how much an ordinary person could buy from AMZN in a lifetime, AMZN has a tremendous amount to lose from "exit"
When I go to a bakery and buy a roll of bread, some of the money I pay the bakery will be squirreled away for future purchases, improvements to the business, expansions, cover lean times, etc.
That margin is called profit and has been the standard way every single business ever has managed ongoing expenses outside of per-transaction costs forever.
Despite this "Gamble", businesses continue to function every day. Some fail, but that is a purposely designed part of the market. If you cannot forecast your costs and revenue, you are supposed to go out of business.
It's funny that only in the world of Tech, the supposedly magical world where you can do so much with so little and one individual can "Build" something used by millions, that suddenly customers have to bear the burden of the business's inability to forecast costs and profit.
What, do you also expect me to tip you when I download?
Keep in mind that the vast vast majority of software subscriptions do not let you continue using the product you have paid for when your subscription lapses, even when the product gets no more support!
> There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions
Such a price clearly exists -- in an extreme case you could charge 50x your annual subscription price and invest it with a 2% yield to get the equivalent of your subscription as interest. More realistically, if you are already considering taking on debt to grow your business it can make financial sense to offer lifetime licenses that are equivalent to several years' worth of subscription revenue to get an influx of up-front liquidity. Of course as your needs change so will your ratio of subscription-to-purchase price and this may result in a purchase price that is too high for your customers to consider, but the number always exists.
> Every one-time price is a gamble
True, but so are subscription prices! Either way, as the person who sets the prices, you are well-positioned to pick ones that are most likely to be successful.
> The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
Yes and no.
You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.
On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.
Also, logging and telemetry only tell you what the app is (or isn't) doing; unless the logging includes user input, screen captures or video recording, it won't tell you where the user failed to understand the UI.
None of these categories seem to build any meaningful rapport. Any honest answer I give is deeply unsatisfying to both parties, and we typically have better data from telemetry or crash logs than the emails provide. It’s certainly useful for us to receive them, but there’s not a helpful response I can give.
I don't know how you read the blog post but it seems your interpretation is uncharitable to say the least.
He wrote he already has good enough telemetry, there is just not much he can write in an e-mail to customer, besides generic "we know the issue thank you for the report" that would be useful for the customer and for themselves.
> You have to accept that your pricing model sucks to a group of people (who are likely experiencing subscription fatigue) and decide if it’s worth losing or never getting their money.
I think the article was very clear that they had already accepted that, and had already decided it was worth never getting their money.
This was also my thought! OP is going to get a lot of arrows for this article, but it's a genuinely great write up that matches a lot of my experience with mass-market products.
It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.
A lot of people in the comments are saying he did it for "likes" - that's a pretty harsh reading of the article.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that the difference between supporting corporates who spend up to millions per year on your product and supporting end-users who are literlly counting every cent they spend is a huge gulf in terms of expectations, technical ability, professionalism.... the list goes on. It's a completely different game.
I thought the article was a brilliant summary of why you simply can't help all the users all the time. It's a hard lesson to learn in the world of Tech Support. We all want to be the knight is shining armour solving customer problems, but the skill to be able to say "no" in the right way is not universal.
To those ragging on the author - there are huge numbers of people who, even if you paid them to use your software, they would still complain and swear at you. It's just life. And dealing with the competing interests of customers, time pressures, personal sanity and many more is almost exactly the job description of Tech Support.
Thanks. I'm not really understanding the likes comment. What are likes in this context? I was very explicit in the post I thought providing better support would build customer relationships and improve retention, and I learned that really isn't true. Also I wrote this a couple days ago so the blog would have content and only submitted on a whim, had I known I'd get 10K views and 100 comments I would've written it more carefully
Thanks for posting this. I have experienced similar. I have found that nasty bug reports are most effective. Good data, and the people are too cheesed off/embarrassed, to follow up, after you address it. Occasionally, it can actually be turned around, and they can become evangelists.
I have integrated a simple feedback form into the app, with the option to send anonymously. That seems to help.
> had I known I'd get 10K views and 100 comments
Is that still the case, after being frontpaged on HN (but most comments are probably here)?
Everybody on HN knows better than OP how to run their own business and could absolutely please 100% of customers or potential customers 100% of the time. Apparently.
I’m a bit doubtful with this conclusion, as apparently in many cases humans will rather refute reality is meaningful if it fails to pass their idealistic proof-test.
> When emails overwhelmed me, I asked a thoughtful user who emailed frequently and seemed to know as much about the product as I did if he’d help answer the emails, so I paid him to do that. And he did a great job, especially in terms of directly solving user problems.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.
Thank you, @dabluck, for sharing what failed. I think stories of failure are incredibly valuable, and more useful than stories of success, which are often post-hoc rationalizations.
I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.
When I was in college, I worked at a bakery and actually made some long-term friends by talking to customers that came into the store. I later used this job experience to get an email support job, answering questions that users had about our software plugin. Never made any long-term friends with customers there, even if they emailed us once a month.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.
Porkbun is an interesting case study for this support model. They reply to everything personally, and for me the important thing is not that I'm talking to a human, but that I'm not hearing corporatespeak.
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
Sure, people want a personal human answer. But not as much as they want the correct answer.
Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.
This is a good point and was a good learning for me. Sometimes people just want to vent or whatever to a corporate email, then they actually aren't delighted at all when a person answers addressing their concern.
Hmm fair comment I guess I could've elaborated. I've definitely done a lot of this, but you would be surprised how often you don't build goodwill even when you do resolve the problem.
Lots of worthwhile observations in the article, but I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.
By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.
> I think the framing is a bit off. It sounds transactional and by the numbers.
It's really not possible to avoid that when, at the end of the day, you're doing it to make a living for yourself and your employees, not doing charity work in your free time because you enjoy it.
> The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
Yep, but that's then called market research, not customer support.
To the writer of the article: you missed a big opportunity with this article by not having an obvious link straight to your product, Castro, and by not telling us in a few words what it does.
It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:
> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…
> 99% of the time, no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email.
When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.
Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.
This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.
> “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Throw those people out immediately. Not only are they bad customers themselves, they also drive away the good ones.
Having worked in product/technical support on and off for almost two decades, I also have noticed some interesting parallels in support interactions with customers from certain countries.
Not all of them were negative, they were just different. Some countries lead with praise and then tangentially ask for a discount. Some countries contact for a legitimate issue/bug which is resolved, and then expect some kind of remuneration for the inconvenience (even if they caused it!), and finally some were almost verbosely thankful and appreciative, re-opening tickets every single time to thank someone vs. just letting the conversation end.
It has really made me rethink customer/client interactions when I have them in person, and also how other countries view my own.
Thanks for telling us who you are. I’ve been meaning to try out Castro for a while now, but I think I’ll pass on giving you one red cent. You should be fine, as the smartest dev in the world
I built and ran a couple of large games and sites for which I was the sole coder, the daily show runner, and the buck-stops-here responder to support requests for everything from bugs to feature requests to fan mail to "my computer crashed and I got kicked out of the game".
Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.
But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.
With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.
What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.
While working for a telecom operator, I tested the idea of having people paying more for dedicated support. We did a market study.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.
The CEO/founder as the L1 support is not the flex it may appear to be.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
From my experience building rapport only makes sense with your most valuable users in terms of revene. Everything else is noise. Non-paying users are most demanding. Its great to talk to lots of people in mvp or ppmf stage, after that once you nail your icp and start charging, you should make the human support a paid feature.
I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.
Interesting how this can be different in a B2B setting. I run a B2B SaaS and consider personal support to be very important. While I do see some of what the OP described, the overall experience is mostly very positive. I enjoy talking to customers and from what I see, most customers appreciate honest responses, even if those responses explain why something can't be done right now or is much more complex than it seems (all too often).
The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.
Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.
Having maintained and done tech support for both B2B and B2C products, as a small shop and often solo, B2B customers are far more predictable and less inclined to load you up with nonsense. And your weekends are always free. However, when they do complain, you're up at 6am on a Sunday. When you have a consumer complaint, you're welcome to sleep as long as you want.
This may seem trivial, but it's a proxy for saying that your feet are constantly to the fire with B2B deployments, in a way that you are not held accountable with B2C apps. I personally work better with the B2B stress and motivation... but it's not without its mental overhead.
With B2B there’s also the big benefit that quite often, the person buying it and the person paying for it are two different people. That makes it easier for the one you built rapport with to still prefer your services over cheaper alternatives.
HN has such a knee-jerk reaction to subscriptions that it will definitely not enjoy it. See how my comment above was downvoted into oblivion just for mentioning them. Problem is, those HN commenters have not tried to run a sustainable business.
The perspective is very different once you actually try to make ends meet.
I also run a B2B SaaS and I could have written this word for word.
The only exception is that I do get a decent amount of word of mouth because many of my customers are individual franchisees in national networks, so they tell their peers who they don’t compete with about me. But that’s not really so much about customer support as the product itself.
The main value I get from doing customer support myself is the same that I get from doing sales myself: learning. I have my pulse directly on what my customers need, like, and dislike about the product.
Secondarily, I do think it helps with both close rate and retention to be able to talk to the business owner, but this might be less true in other niches.
> Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
I'll admit I mostly don't care for subscriptions for this sort of thing. But to be more constructive, it seems to me like it's a hole in the market that doesn't have a really good solution right now. I mean, software like this which does need at least a little bit of ongoing support, but doesn't seem to generate enough ongoing value for customers for it to feel reasonable to have a subscription for. None of the solutions we have for that right now really feel great to anybody.
My arguably rather informative comment based on 10 years of running a sustainable B2B SaaS got downvoted to 0. I realize subscriptions are unpopular (nobody likes paying regularly), but downvoting what you disagree with means that eventually it will become invisible and you will only see what you agree with.
I think I need to take a break from posting on HN.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 66.7 ms ] thread> I have already thought about this a great deal. I am not changing anything based on your email.
> User can provide details for us, but if others aren’t experiencing it, it’s unlikely to be prioritized.
> We know about this, but fixing it is a decent amount of work or low-priority because it’s not a big deal or few users see it.
> a human response detailing why I am unable to solve your problem today and am not even going to try is about the worst thing a user can receive!
> Good in theory, sometimes useful, but often the same small, unrepresentative segment with strong thoughts.
> Castro is an opinionated app and I’ve thought a lot about what we’re building and what we’re going to work on next. It’s unlikely I’m going to implement the request.
Your support policy seems to be more along the lines of "you may e-mail me for an explanation of why I'm not interested in your thoughts" than an actual commitment to support for paid customers. You aren't interested in comments on the payment model, bugs, or feature requests.
> why software lends itself to subscription so well [...] no matter how carefully or kindly it’s explained, the reply will be more negative than the initial email
Especially when you're using it to justify scummy practices, it's no wonder that no matter how kindly and carefully you piss on your users, they know it's not raining.
You mention early in the article that you intended to base this approach as a response to your own subpar user experience with support in other products. But does your user experience with other products tell you that you want to subscribe and be nickle-and-dimed for the rest of your life for every last thing? Especially when you're promising to users that while you're still working on the software and that's why they need to pay every month forever, you won't work on the features they want? Subscription works "so well" for software because it makes you a lot of money, but it doesn't work well for the users its being forced upon who don't actually want the updates you're working on.
As far as I can tell, your software is not significantly based on ongoing maintenance costs, ergo it does not inherently justify ongoing payments to use. If you let greed stop clouding your eyes, you could adopt the approach that many ethical independent developers use: an option to pay once per major version and keep it for life, with optional subscriptions to try the waters and keep up with the latest and greatest version.
People are however consistently willing to regularly make one-off purchases to get something they can "own". I've bought way more lifetime licenses for software than I've taken out subscriptions. When you consider that nobody stays subscribed for life, there's always a number that you can charge for lifetime which is in fact functionally equivalent to a subscription anyway.
This was the biggest (1) complaint for me - in light of what you discovered from your actual support experience, why was your expectation so off?
Was it that you expected support to be full of "how do I do this complicated thing?" questions that can be answered by an expert? That's an unrealistic expectation, but I guess now you know.
Or was it that you really thought that customers would be happy if you just took the time to explain your pricing model to them (also unrealistic).
It is kind of obvious from the types of emails you get, and the types of responses you give that it was not going to lead to strong customer relationships. If all you're doing is writing a 100 words to say "No, I'm not going to do what you want" that's not going to make things better.
(1) Actually 2nd biggest - the biggest was talking about "buying Castro" but having no explanation/links about who the author is, what Castro is, or how/when/why it was bought.
It seems to often boil down to the fact that paying customers are paying to solve a problem so they don’t need to deal with it. Whereas developers are more interested in writing code than solving said problems for customers.
How soon is it? Tomorrow? Next week? 10 years?
People are so sure that LLMs will change everything >>soon<<.
I've often heard stuff like "telecom provider support sucks" or "IKEA furniture breaks easily."
When you ask people whether they researched support quality before deciding on a provider or whether they considered a $3,000 heavy-wood furniture the boomers had, they immediately sense the accusation in the question: It was their decision to suffer these fates. They then tend to get mad fast.
People like to save 3 cents on their monthly internet bill and to disassemble their furniture in 5 minutes. It's exactly why everyone is optimizing for it.
It's rarely 0.03 though in my experience. More like 10 a month or even more between the cheap options with bad support and the better ones. Even if you have one issue every year (sounds high to me), that's over a hundred per support phone call. Makes you think twice about the trade-offs.
Your support strategy is missing an outlet for needy users to ask questions, effectively blaming customers for a structural flaw in your own setup. You could easily spin up a forum where power users help each other and devs can occasionally jump in to help or note pain points. Furthermore, your development and QA processes clearly need scrutiny. The reason bug reports feel like a ‘waste of everyone’s time’ is likely because you don't have the right error logging or telemetry built into the app itself. Having to wait for a manual bug report from a user is already a failure.
It’s completely okay to define your product however you want and to reject feature requests, but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
> but to say you’ve singularly thought through every problem in an armchair, in comparison with the distributed minds of the rest of us, is pretty arrogant.
Somehow incredibly ironic when applied to you comment itself...
I’m missing the irony.
Which is exactly why HN's anti-telemetry stance is so unjustified.
And for some subscription situations, you can probably offer them a price that works for both of you.
There's a 'PhotoSync' app that offers a premium option for either $1/month or $24 for life. Presumably because they looked at the average subscription duration and found it was in the region of 2 years. Modulo the time value of money and per-transaction processing costs.
Personally I much preferred the one-off purchase, even though it's not clear I'll be using the app in 24 months, because it fits a lot better with my (somewhat chaotic) way of managing my money.
There is no such price, because there is no way to sustainably develop a product without subscriptions. You can't go to a local bakery and pay $24 for life to get fresh rolls every day.
Every one-time price is a gamble, where somebody is betting on something. It's a way to close your eyes and pretend ongoing costs do not exist.
But I have run a bakery for 5 years, and you get better day by day, you introduce new techniques, find different flours, optimize bake times for fluffiness, crispiness, and taste. The croissants we make today are much better than what we made during our first month.
We improved our product just like how software improves, but we did it without a croissant subscription, but by selling its own version as its own thing day by day.
What software companies need to do is sell versions, where the life time of the version usefulness is actually limited. In the physical world, we have wear and tear, or in the case of croissants, decomposition or consumption which limit customers from using the same product forever.
Can the same not be found for many software products?
To use iOS as an example, the OPs app Castro charges for night mode, but night mode via OS controls didn’t always exist in iOS so a theoretical Castro v1 could have been released without before it, and v2 would include that new feature. Or when inevitably, v1 no longer works on new iOS versions, people would have to upgrade.
Some of the enterprise software I've worked on has an option that functions this way. You pay for a specific version which is supported for a few years. You can keep using it forever but if you want to keep getting security updates or live support then you'll have to buy a newer version that is still in its support window.
Having said that, it seems like most businesses seem to prefer subscriptions.
I agree that paying a one time price and expecting continuos updates and new features is not reasonable.
A great example for me is the Xodo app on Android. It's by far the best PDF editor that I've found on Android, particularly for annotating with a digital pen. Some features are locked. If I want to unlock them, it's $5 a month. I get nothing out of that which isn't already in the app. I'm happy to pay a one-off fee for the work the developers have done up to that point. I'm definitely not happy to add another $5 a month to my pile of subscriptions.
For me the boundary is this: (1) If I get something of value every month (e.g. use of a cloud server, or something which obviously needs regular updating like Netflix) -> subscription justified; (2) If I just want to use what I can already see in the app -> very unlikely I'll ever subscribe unless the product is absolutely essential to me and there are no competitors.
A good example of the latter is Skritter. I don't care about new functionality, but there literally isn't another app which can do what it does, so I pay the subscription.
- Subscriptions are marketed as being a lot more than just bugfixes - new features being the big one. But there's usually no cheaper "bugfix-only" subscription, which means that someone who doesn't care about new features has to pay for them anyway.
- To be honest - yes, I do expect bugfixes for free if I've paid to buy the product. After all, a bug is a defect, and products are usually sold with the expectation that they will be fit for purpose. That's the principle which applies to physical consumer products, so why should it be any different for software? If I bought software that calculates my taxes for me, and it turns out a bug means that it applies the wrong tax rules, then I haven't got what I paid for. Why am I expected to pay every month just to make my software do what it was supposed to do in the first place?
- The developer is still incentivised to fix bugs in order to attract new purchasers.
- Subscriptions aren't a magic solution financially anyway, because there's an average limit to how long a customer stays subscribed for.
Also note that expectations can vary quite a bit between physical and software products. For an example, my vacuum cleaner fairly often shuts down if I stop and re-start it too soon. If this happened with an app, I would certainly consider it a pretty ugly bug, and might ask when they plan to fix it. But I would never consider sending the vacuum cleaner to a service station to try and get rid of it - and I think there is little chance they could fix it even if I did.
Yes. On the exact major OS version you signed up on.
Also, it's far less likely than you're suggesting that I would need the exact major OS version I started with. The majority of apps survive an OS upgrade just fine. In my case, I use NixOS, so that isn't even an issue at all since every package can have all of its dependencies frozen for as long as you like, even with a new major OS version.
It costs $99/year to keep your app on the Apple App Store. Stop paying and all apps are delisted.
It costs $5/month to maintain a business phone line (Apple needs a phone number)
It costs $10/month for a mail forwarding service (or else Apple will publish your home address)
It costs ~$100/year to maintain an LLC.
A developer must buy a new Mac every 10-12 years or so just to maintain basic OS support (we can call that ~$50 a year for a MacBook Neo, but if you want your code compile to not be painful you’ll probably grab a MacBook Pro).
Domain name? $15/year. Business email, $10/year.
There are plenty of businesses that have all that overhead and still sell things instead of subscriptions.
Flip this argument around: you go buy a rake at the hardware store. They tell you they need to charge $5 a month for as long as you want to use it since they have to pay for a phone and website, no apple fee, but their city business license is more than that, etc.
Precisely no one will take that deal. If the store wants to stay in business they must continue to sell more products. It’s not my responsibility to keep paying them for a product so they can have a phone line.
If you are selling an app that has a service backing it or are providing support and updates, fine. Try to sell it as a subscription. If you are selling an app that runs entirely on my device? Version it. If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development, create a new version that has something I would want to pay for.
> If you want me to pay for your overhead of continued development
My recollection with the status of 20-30 years ago is that people would sell you buggy applications for huge amounts of money and then you would be on your own. Doing good applications, without bugs, supported on multiple platforms and multiple use-cases is very expensive and takes time. Not sure what was your experience with pay once and just use the app, maybe it was better...
The benefit of subscriptions is that everybody has more flexibility. The developers can work continuously on the application. The customers can already use it for less than a one time (very large price) and see if it fits their needs and can change their mind if things don't go in the right direction.
When you really think about all the things a hardware store sells, not a lot of it lasts forever.
As a customer I’m totally all for buy-once and FOSS software. But I recognize that it’s not always the economic reality.
There’s plenty of buy-once iOS software out there. I’m definitely not saying that developers can’t do it, merely that I don’t blame the ones who go subscription-based, and that a lot of customers don’t realize the ongoing costs associated with publishing an iOS app.
I’m not blaming the ones who go subscription based. I endorsed it as a model when it makes sense (when you are providing a service inherent to the product, eg.). Developing the next version of your software doesn’t qualify as a service in my mind.
I’m complaining about software that goes subscription based completely unnecessarily. Adobe is the perfect example. There is no reason I shouldn’t be able to just buy photoshop. That worked fine for decades. I don’t need a subscription to MS Word, either. What new development has happened in text editing since autosave was added a few decades ago?
I can still play my original copy of Half Life, and valve is doing fantastic selling software instead of subscriptions. Arguably they are one of the biggest and most loved by consumers for that.
This is clearly incorrect given that there are plenty of software developers who offer lifetime purchases. In fact there was a time that subscriptions for software were virtually unheard of.
On a lower level, all that matters is the numbers. If your average customer stays subscribed for 24 months, then charging a lifetime fee equal to 24 months is equivalent to a subscription model. At that point it's irrelevant what's "sustainable" since 24 months is the max you can expect to charge on average anyway.
There's a big difference between software you buy, run on your computer, and don't expect to be constantly updated, vs. an online service that you expect to stay up and serve you new content forever. In the latter case, if a customer drops off after 24 months, that lowers your costs. You can't reasonably charge a user for the number of months they could potentially remain subscribed.
The gambling goes both ways. Your $1 subscription price is betting that you can convince each user to keep on paying that subscription forever, their $24 lifetime price is betting that customers are going to churn after a year on average.
Your gamble is perhaps slightly safer, in the sense that if subscriptions fall so too do the ongoing costs. But there is a floor to costs (i.e. you need to keep paying your team), so both approaches are pretty dependent on the sales funnel bringing in new subscribers
If it’s sustainable at $1/month, and a customer is willing to prepay $1200 for a 100 year subscription, that sounds sustainable to me.
Maybe tomorrow my competitor will aggressively cut prices. Maybe the product line I've spent money developing won't sell well. Maybe that new machine I've invested in won't be as productive as the marketing materials promised. Maybe bad weather will mean my customers stay home instead of visiting my shop. Maybe a war on the other side of the planet will raise my material costs and empty my customers' wallets. Maybe the artist headlining my music festival won't be allowed to enter the country. Maybe 10 years into its 50 year life my nuclear power plant will be undercut by falling costs for solar. Maybe Google will make the thing my app does a native feature of their OS. Maybe we pushed the envelope too far or didn't test thoroughly enough and we'll be buried in warranty claims.
This risk is why investments in businesses pay more than treasury bonds.
If you aren't comfortable with that, entrepreneurship might not be right for you - nothing wrong with being an employee and getting the certainty of a monthly salary.
So if you’re a bakery and a customer offers $9000+ for a fresh roll every day forever, you should almost certainly take them up on that offer. A smart baker could probably get that number sub-$5000, but you’ll always come out okay around 25x the yearly cost (in this case, $365).
Similarly, if the amortized yearly cost of a customer is $12 (ie, $1 per month), then a $300 forever price is financially indistinguishable from a permanent subscription. (Actually, better: time value of money, they can’t cancel the annuity you buy, etc.)
So there always is a price where that is financially viable.
IIRC this rate is based on some standard retirement length (like 30 years), not forever.
(1) Raise capital and spend a year developing a product
(2) Release the product, make a certain amount of money, then revenue dries up
(3) Pay yourself a bit and feed the rest of the money into develop version 2.0
(4) A year later it is struggle to sell version 2.0 because you're not just competing with applications from other people you are competing with your old 1.0, your most satisfied customers might be the least likely to upgrade
And that assumes development for 2.0 goes according to plan! As a software developer who gets a paycheck my life is easier working on a subscription based project my life is easier because management is not facing a financial crisis because a project is running a few months late.
As a customer though I often like paying ahead and I've been through a few cycles like this with Plex. Like I see the lifetime offering from Plex and I have the money now and it looks like a good deal... Then two years later they come up with something that really alienates me (that FAST service) and I hate being pushed into something I want nothing to deal with. So I go to Jellyfin and it is a godawful mess that I never get working quite right, just watching a movie with family and friends becomes an exercise in humiliation.
And I'm thinking... I don't have the option of exit [1] because I can't cancel my Plex pass! If on the other hand I was paying for a monthly subscription they are motivated to care what I think [2]
Now funny I had this summer when I was trying to gentle a stray cat [3] in a room in the other house and wound up watching a lot of Tubi, came to the conclusion FAST wasn't so bad, switched back to Plex, got a monthly subscription, and I am highly satisfied.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
[2] I hate to be this way but when I have trouble w/ amazon I write to jeff@amazon.com and point out that it makes no sense to screw me for $20 because I have a say in at least $2M NPV of AWS cloud spending, when you consider a Prime subscription and how much an ordinary person could buy from AMZN in a lifetime, AMZN has a tremendous amount to lose from "exit"
[3] https://mastodon.social/@UP8/tagged/bobb
That margin is called profit and has been the standard way every single business ever has managed ongoing expenses outside of per-transaction costs forever.
Despite this "Gamble", businesses continue to function every day. Some fail, but that is a purposely designed part of the market. If you cannot forecast your costs and revenue, you are supposed to go out of business.
It's funny that only in the world of Tech, the supposedly magical world where you can do so much with so little and one individual can "Build" something used by millions, that suddenly customers have to bear the burden of the business's inability to forecast costs and profit.
What, do you also expect me to tip you when I download?
Keep in mind that the vast vast majority of software subscriptions do not let you continue using the product you have paid for when your subscription lapses, even when the product gets no more support!
Such a price clearly exists -- in an extreme case you could charge 50x your annual subscription price and invest it with a 2% yield to get the equivalent of your subscription as interest. More realistically, if you are already considering taking on debt to grow your business it can make financial sense to offer lifetime licenses that are equivalent to several years' worth of subscription revenue to get an influx of up-front liquidity. Of course as your needs change so will your ratio of subscription-to-purchase price and this may result in a purchase price that is too high for your customers to consider, but the number always exists.
> Every one-time price is a gamble
True, but so are subscription prices! Either way, as the person who sets the prices, you are well-positioned to pick ones that are most likely to be successful.
Yes and no.
You want enough logging and telemetry that you can roll out an update to 2% of users and know if something is terribly wrong before you roll it out to the other 98%.
On the other hand, you probably don't want enough telemetry to detect that customer Jim Smith has trouble with WebRTC when joining calls without a microphone while using Firefox and Cloudflare Warp with split tunnels enabled.
I don't know how you read the blog post but it seems your interpretation is uncharitable to say the least.
He wrote he already has good enough telemetry, there is just not much he can write in an e-mail to customer, besides generic "we know the issue thank you for the report" that would be useful for the customer and for themselves.
tell me you've never run anything without telling me you've never run anything...
I think the article was very clear that they had already accepted that, and had already decided it was worth never getting their money.
It’s interesting that you did the experiment, and I appreciate you sharing your results. It all seems reasonable, even if a bit depressing.
It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.
What I think a lot of people are missing is that the difference between supporting corporates who spend up to millions per year on your product and supporting end-users who are literlly counting every cent they spend is a huge gulf in terms of expectations, technical ability, professionalism.... the list goes on. It's a completely different game.
I thought the article was a brilliant summary of why you simply can't help all the users all the time. It's a hard lesson to learn in the world of Tech Support. We all want to be the knight is shining armour solving customer problems, but the skill to be able to say "no" in the right way is not universal.
To those ragging on the author - there are huge numbers of people who, even if you paid them to use your software, they would still complain and swear at you. It's just life. And dealing with the competing interests of customers, time pressures, personal sanity and many more is almost exactly the job description of Tech Support.
I have integrated a simple feedback form into the app, with the option to send anonymously. That seems to help.
> had I known I'd get 10K views and 100 comments
Is that still the case, after being frontpaged on HN (but most comments are probably here)?
> I thought ... people would appreciate this,
gets translated into "I'm only doing this so that people will star/upvote/'like and subscribe' "
"likes" -> the universal currency of internet fame
Idealism doesn't survive contact with reality.
Hey, I got promoted from customer to Customer Support at _my_ $dayjob!
Let's review some common areas.
- Pricing: everyone is always looking to get a better deal. That's their right but I'm unlikely to give one. Saying no here is just another (emotional) cost of doing business.
- Bug reports: broad agree on all four points but not necessarily the conclusion. Users who are willing to go down the debugging rabbit hole with me are golden.
- Pathological customers: I like to call them "frequent flyers". Enough said.
- Feature requests: we're not necessarily as "opinionated" so we rarely give a hard no, but this is why we have a "feedback board with upvotes" approach.
- General usage questions: I have an attitude of fresh eyes often being the best eyes for usability testing. If it's not obvious, what can we do to make it so? We also use Intercom Fin to handle a lot of these level-0-support questions though.
I’m sorry all the airchair geniuses in this thread feel compelled to express how they’re so much smarter than you and would never fail… or at least, never admit it.
The difference is that email / online support has no “human downtime moments.” At the bakery, I usually would talk to people while we were waiting for their order to be finished heating up / cooking / etc. So there was a moment or two people standing around waiting, which naturally leads to a conversation. Or at least it did a decade ago when cellphones weren’t quite as omnipresent.
I wonder if having a monthly Zoom “open office hours” type thing would replicate some of this feeling in a software context. Probably not, but it might be better than just answering emails.
I think you meant "I can think of exactly one customer in two years who was NOT surprised that software costs money"?
I would even be happy to talk to a bot if it was fine-tuned to speak like a regular person instead of a corporate drone.
Also, I think that we want to communicate with a company (Human or AI), and not a person, quite often. As you’re supporting a business transaction, not making friends. There’s a certain anonymity that comes with the business transaction. I wouldn’t ask for a refund from a friend.
> We have heard this before, but we cannot see it or replicate it. The user gets to do work for us and/or get no resolution
Well, if you're not willing to resolve individual customer's problem then don't expect to build goodwill with just prompt human reply on support!
I think it's fairly well understood that vocal users aren't necessarily representative. The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
You need to build your own model of who your users are to provide a basis for interpreting user requests: is the support request signal or noise? if the request is coming from someone in your target market, and expressing a pain point, that's potentially an important signal. If the request is to charge only 20% of your current price, that's only useful if you're prepared to consider restructuring your offering (receiving many such emails might signal an opportunity for a budget product with specific feature subset) -- otherwise: "Thanks for your email, we don't have any plans to change our price right now." move on.
By the way, I'm impressed that this is even a conversation for a developer selling through the App Store. I always felt that Apple killed the ability to maintain customer relationships by injecting themselves into the process. Never published on the Mac App store myself.
It's really not possible to avoid that when, at the end of the day, you're doing it to make a living for yourself and your employees, not doing charity work in your free time because you enjoy it.
> The bulk of your happy users will never contact you for support. But they are some of the most important users to talk to to improve the product.
Yep, but that's then called market research, not customer support.
It’s not too late to change the first sentence to:
> I had an idea when I bought [Castro](whatever_the_url_is), a XXX app, that human support…
This is a podcast app. It's in no way essential, how did you use to explain this to your customers ?
When I was in a product leadership position I liked to spend time doing some of the customer support work. This is a common experience. Customers who write angry emails do not care about your reasons. They want something from you (cheaper rates, a specific feature they need, a discount, a freebie) and they do not care about anything else. It’s the digital version of the “I’d like to speak to your manager” customer who thinks that if there’s a 10% chance of getting what they want by being a jerk then it’s worth pushing as hard as they can.
Some times you’d get a little satisfaction from someone who realized there was a person who cared on the receiving end of that email address. Made it feel worthwhile.
Most of them are just doing some transactional game where they think that they can exercise some power over the company if they complain loudly enough.
This also has a lot of cultural differences. Some of the customer contact we’d get from one of the countries we served were out of control mean. There were casual threats of violence from time to time and 90% of them came from one country, which I’m not going to name but I’ve added it to my mental list of places not to visit. It was weird that it was so consistent.
genuinely curious. Which country was it?
Throw those people out immediately. Not only are they bad customers themselves, they also drive away the good ones.
Not all of them were negative, they were just different. Some countries lead with praise and then tangentially ask for a discount. Some countries contact for a legitimate issue/bug which is resolved, and then expect some kind of remuneration for the inconvenience (even if they caused it!), and finally some were almost verbosely thankful and appreciative, re-opening tickets every single time to thank someone vs. just letting the conversation end.
It has really made me rethink customer/client interactions when I have them in person, and also how other countries view my own.
Every line item there has a solution. Even if it is just 4 different email addresses.
Building rapport is not the reason for doing this. Being liked by everyone is an impossible goal. And yes, there is a class of customers who are power users who think their input should dictate the development roadmap. And yes, there are users who become psychologically reliant on you as their personal Geek Squad. And yes, there are non-technical people who encounter hard to reproduce bugs, who it's worth taking the time to work with if they can help you isolate the problem.
But doing it for "likes" is a terrible idea. I was once put out as a coder to be a public face of a big AAA game, on their dev forum, to interact with fan requests, and I think that was catastrophic both for my own sanity and for the company that chose to field fan mail that way.
With your big fans, you see what you can do about their feature requests. Never promise anything. With people who encounter real bugs or otherwise provide signal, try to turn them into sleuths and get them to beta test your next release. Draw boundaries. Letting your users be your testers is enormously valuable, so respect them and don't stop listening to their feedback. But the overarching goal here is to get value out of the process. Explicitly not to waste your time on being "liked". Because the kind of people who become obsessive over your CS responses are actually the worst customers who don't want to pay for anything anyway, and expect everything to be free.
What I'm saying does not mean to pull back on customer service, at all! It means that the goal is to improve your product, not to suck up to all those categories of customers in the hopes they'll like you more. They will or they won't like your product, and in the end, whether they personally feel that affinity for it is based on their enjoyment of it. If it's based on their sense of importance at being able to order you around, they're not your real customers anyway.
I turned out that customers are not ready to pay for support. Cognitively, paying for a service and paying on top for this service to work well is not consistent.
As a result, people have minimal support and complain. But they don't value good support either.
NB: companies do pay for (insurance) support, especially for swift resolution. But consumers or small businesses don't want it.
As a user, if the CEO/founder is answering my questions, I honestly will wonder if this is a one man fly by night operation that will be gone next week.
Also, a satisfactory support experience may not be the fastest one. If I ask for something, L1 says "no", but then escalates to sales, sales say "no", but escalate to the founder, the founder says "yes", the user may feel more "heard" and has a better sense of achievement than if the founder is the L1 who says "yes" immediately. The outcome is the same, but one will feel "earned".
I’ll tell you even more, in enterprise b2b saas, usually the company paying few thousand per month would have less questions and requests than the one paying few hundreds.
The difference is that my customers are mostly engineers in small to medium sized businesses. They understand that 1) ongoing development costs money, hence subscriptions, 2) there are no magic wands and things are indeed more complex than they seem.
This is one of the reasons why I don't want to get into B2C. At a first approximation, people just don't want to spend money, hate subscriptions, have zero appreciation for how much ongoing development costs, do not understand that the money has to come from somewhere and that $5 purchase 6 years ago really doesn't cover the costs, and do not understand the complexity of software and product development.
Even here on HN, if you read the comments, there is so much blind hate against subscriptions, with little (if any) consideration for a sustainable software business.
Incidentally, I thought personal support would be a competitive differentiator, but I don't think it really works that way. Yes, customers do appreciate it a lot, but so what? Business customers don't talk to each other much, you won't get "viral" recommendations. And new potential customers have no idea how your support works, they think it's the same AI chatbot and knowledge base search as anywhere else.
Having maintained and done tech support for both B2B and B2C products, as a small shop and often solo, B2B customers are far more predictable and less inclined to load you up with nonsense. And your weekends are always free. However, when they do complain, you're up at 6am on a Sunday. When you have a consumer complaint, you're welcome to sleep as long as you want.
This may seem trivial, but it's a proxy for saying that your feet are constantly to the fire with B2B deployments, in a way that you are not held accountable with B2C apps. I personally work better with the B2B stress and motivation... but it's not without its mental overhead.
This is correct thanks for the comment. You will enjoy my next post which is about exactly this. (HN will not enjoy it)
The perspective is very different once you actually try to make ends meet.
The only exception is that I do get a decent amount of word of mouth because many of my customers are individual franchisees in national networks, so they tell their peers who they don’t compete with about me. But that’s not really so much about customer support as the product itself.
The main value I get from doing customer support myself is the same that I get from doing sales myself: learning. I have my pulse directly on what my customers need, like, and dislike about the product.
Secondarily, I do think it helps with both close rate and retention to be able to talk to the business owner, but this might be less true in other niches.
I'll admit I mostly don't care for subscriptions for this sort of thing. But to be more constructive, it seems to me like it's a hole in the market that doesn't have a really good solution right now. I mean, software like this which does need at least a little bit of ongoing support, but doesn't seem to generate enough ongoing value for customers for it to feel reasonable to have a subscription for. None of the solutions we have for that right now really feel great to anybody.
I think I need to take a break from posting on HN.