I wish I could upvote this more than once. Customer support burden is always underestimated. It's time consuming, especially if you want to do it properly & not just outsource to someone overseas following a script. Even releasing something as freeware is likely to cause an unintended stream of support enquiries. I have no idea how the folks selling 99c apps manage it, even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time).

Kudos on charging a sensible price for your app & upgrades! I imagine at that price point it's okay if a sale incurs a support ticket or two.

Before I charged money for my software, I was afraid of the overwhelming flood of customer support requests. Except they never came.

> even one short email enquiry would wipe out a dozen sales or more (if you put a monetary value your time)

Per email, yes, absolutely. Sometimes I take 20 minutes to answer a more complex email. But since I know that I don't receive more than 5-10 emails, I take the time and this person might recommend my software to other people, because of the great support.

An easy way to mitigate customer support is to have FAQs and lots of written texts on the website. Most people prefer to help themselves I think, because its faster.

Sometimes I wonder if this is a mentality thing. My customers are all Germans. Maybe US customers are faster to send a short email than browsing through FAQ.

> Maybe US customers are faster to send a short email than browsing through FAQ.

I get some emails where the entirety of the support question is "The program doesn't work. Is it a bug? Please advise." Some customers don't mention which product they're using, or will even send me support enquiries for competitors products.

Not meaning to be ungrateful (I'm lucky to do what I do!), just that I couldn't afford to do it on a $5 one-off app purchase.

1. You could repurpose emails and turn them into FAQ content (= small SEO improvements).

2. If I take the time to answer an email for 20 minutes, I just find it intriguing and such an email almost always helps me to improve my expertise a bit.

3. Even if it's a whole month of support per year: So what? This is my job and I get paid good money for it ;)

> "The program doesn't work. Is it a bug? Please advise." Some customers don't mention which product they're using, or will even send me support enquiries for competitors products.

Get aText or TextExpander or something like that, make a predefined template that asks for more information.

While I answer every single email, I try to spend the least amount of time on people who seem a bit...weird in their questions. If people don't take the time to write a good question, I don't take time to provide a good answer. Requesting more information is a good way to annoy them a bit back. Maybe they either clarify what they want or they'll try to help themselves.

> just that I couldn't afford to do it on a $5 one-off app purchase.

Have you thought about turning this into a subscription? If it provides value on a daily basis, people might pay more than you think, let's say $12 per year.

I do that, but it also creates support enquiries for competitors products. I rank well for "how to install Photoshop Plugins", which means I get the emails for how to install my competitors plugins too :) Should be great lead-gen, but I've not found a way to convert those visits into downloads/sales of my own plugins.

> Have you thought about turning this into a subscription?

Sometimes, but some customers specifically said they bought my software because it wasn't a subscription. I'm also charging $20 - $25 per sale now, trying to price for at least one support case per sale.

Ah I see. You've got some general advice content and people write to you about it. Since you obviously tracked conversion for that, I see these options:

a) Answer those emails sincerely as a hobby

b) Answer with a template only ("Please write to the creator of that plugin you found, they'd love to help you!")

c) Explain somewhere in the article that you can only provide email support for paying customers, then don't answer

d) Put in the article: "If you need help installing a plugin other than $MY_PLUGIN_NAME, I'm happy to provide support for you for $15 per 15 minutes. Buy customer support now"

If you're used to carving out a slice of your day to respond quickly to a batch of such emails, then it's fine. But if you're in a frame of mind where you're primarily worried about something else you really feel you need to get done, it can seem very hard to set that aside and reply to even a single email in any meaningful way.

(But yes, I've also had the experience that charging money does not suddenly make your users any more demanding.)

7.5(the average of your 5-10 emails per day)*30(days) /7000=~0.003 =%0.3

how would you explain the fact that only 0.3% of your customers send you an email/month ? What contributes to it being so low ?

they don't. or they quit. or they raise their price...

You gave me an idea for a business model - Let's say you offer a pingdom-like service (to monitor your site availability and reliablity) -

You can just do the following:

1. Offer the service 100% Free, at your own risk

2. Offer a $x/month subscription . if you don't pay - you won't get any customer support.

Or, you can will still offer free support for non-paying customers, but without any priority (their tickets will be handled only after the paying customer's tickets)

Does anyone know of a company that is offering this type of model ?

(edit: added missing words and spacing)

As a SaaS founder — I've always felt it's a bit of an odd value proposition — "pay me more, and I'll fix my flawed, buggy software".

There's a small incentive to write deliberately obscured code, but I think it gets outweighed by maintainability concerns.

Hmm. I think it makes sense if you begin with the assumption that all software is flawed and buggy by default.

Also, you'd be incentivizing your company to make support more complex so users call, email etc.

If you cancel the subscription, you won't get support. I don't understand your point :)

Apple in-app subs let you "cancel" but only in the way of not paying for the next renewal, so it is a widely used model already.

exactly this. Just cancel his subscription the NEXT month, and you solved the problem, financially and technically :)

And who would HATE this proposition ? the spammers :) now they won't be able to do what the OP has suggested they might do (pay -> get support -> cancel ):)

(edit: spacing.

I spend a decent chunk of my time on support requests and have thought about this quite a bit. While the number of incoming support requests are evenly split across (1) people interested in purchasing, (2) people who have already purchased, and (3) people who are on our free tier, the latter group ends up having the longest support conversations.

I've thought about setting up an autoresponse that asks people to add their subscription ID to the email for priority service.

I don't know if this would work, backfire, or do nothing, and I'd be interested to know what others have experimented with.

It's an old-school desktop app with a 30-day trial period, a single payment to unlock the app, and a major new version released every two years available for an upgrade fee to existing users.