Free customers did report bugs, and we would replicate, triage, and fix them as usual. These tended to be more obscure bugs (more severe ones would usually surface in the paid queues first), but we didn't discard them immediately.
Whether we effectively ignored bugs depended more on the ability of the customer to provide an actionable report. Some users provide exactly what we need up front, but there is a lot of "it doesn't work!" white noise from users that aren't able to or aren't willing to put in the work to accurately describe their issue and/or action feedback from us. There's usually not a whole lot support can do in that scenario if we don't see any obvious issues, but we'd go a bit further to placate paying customers--I fondly remember joining a call between some very technically inept user and their ISP who was adamant that either we or the ISP were at fault, after we guided their network team through taking local packet captures showing unanswered SYNs past their network border.
https://cloud.google.com/support#support-plans
$250/month/dev is the minimal for phone calls on technical issues, $150k + 4% of GCP spend for 'come running' support.
There're more details here
https://cloud.google.com/support/docs/procedures#additional_...
though they use the old names for the support tiers.
Disclaimer: Is a TSE...
For small to medium sized businesses, that number is probably 1.
If a service you depend on is down, your support agent will be able to tell you it's down, but not speed up the fix.
Cloud support will have more information about performance black holes and limitations that the documents don't describe. They also will be able to advise on "is this design or that design likely better". They generally know how the backends of GCP services work, and their common failure modes, which is pretty hard knowledge to get from the outside.
They really deeply understand AWS, are very responsive to calls/emails, but often have no tools to solve the problem we're having right now.
This even happened with some of their high end hardware, we did an upgrade for a critical set of instances to some extremely pricey dedicated hosts and ended up in a runaround for over a week due to a hardware issue on their side.
We don't really have any way to know from your story whether Scaleway's support was under normal or extra load and delivered an excellent experience, or whether they had a bunch of bored support reps just waiting for something to work on because it was abnormally slow. The latter is nice, at the moment it happens, but doesn't really help you if 2 days later for a different issue you're left in a lurch for days on end because they're busy. The former would be good for maybe indicating that.
That's the whole point of service level guarantees. They provide a lower bound on the support you'll receive, which is often much more important and useful to track.
What "level" of customer or SLA do you have to be to get a certain quantity or guarantee of support and troubleshooting? Or is it that if even a free-tier customer points out something that is fundamentally a problem, it will receive attention by certain solutions engineers?
Are there $ spending, 20 x (c3.4x.large), or I-pay-you-for-certain-uptime/troubleshooting levels that get you certain response levels? Do certain problems get resolved with "well, you just have to live with that behavior, we're not fixing that".
Do you get to call them or chat live? Or is it all via tickets?