"I'm sorry let me refund the money you paid for this" must be the all time favorite answer for stubborn or impolite users of software that has been provided for free and with no strings attached.

My second favorite (would be first if not for the slightly snarky style) is "Please, go read the License". This is to say that the License typically states that "this software is provided AS-IS with no guarantees at all", but in a very indirect way that most people won't understand when told to them... but I still like that answer, FWIW :-)

Lol what the heck, the first one is WAY more snarky than the second! Unless you meant that the second is just not dripping in enough snark.

The one I typically use with rude, demanding users is:

"Pull requests are always welcome :)"

The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY aggressive and angry.

The amount of people that personally attack you and accuse you of horrible things should be zero.

I've also seen users personally using our forums to try to get the software for free and complaining it costs too much money.

As soon as it's clear that one of the developers is listening they go quiet but it's super disheartening when your community, which should be supporting you, feels so entitled.

> The problem is that 95% of users are awesome but 5% are VERY aggressive and angry.

Interestingly enough I used to have a customer facing job in a completely different industry and it was exactly the same situation there. 90-95% of customers were great; they were pleasant and easy to deal with. But man, the bad ones took up sooo much time and energy, it was ridiculous.

Everyone should work a retail or hospitality role for a bit. I’ve never been rude to serving staff, but after I did a stint. God damn. There are some entitled assholes out there.

> who demand premium service when encountering a bug

In the same vein, I have a bully, he both writes me on my professional email (to ask me for reparations), AND writes me on public forums 12hrs later asking why I didn’t answer him yet. So it is not only free users who expect premium service, nowadays even bullies expect 12-hrs response ;)

(For all I’m concerned, he can go to court if he really believes I owe him something, I give it 0% chance, but he’s clinging to his illusions).

I’m curious, what’s his claim? Used your software, something happened making lose data or anything like that?

Sorry for the off-topic, it is a very lowerclass problem: We did Youtube episodes at 4 people and we noticed he had a private life that we didn’t want to be associated with, so we removed him from the next episodes (under a false pretense to avoid saying in public what we had discovered). So he wants 15k because we’ve kept the previous episodes online (to which he was interviewed knowingly, didn’t say anything abnormal either, there’s only his first name, and only the voice no video, it’s ~8k views, not monetized), and he said even if we removed them he’d keep on taking revenge for the next 30 years. So we estimated it wasn’t worth removing the other episodes, given the debate was still interesting, and given he would move on to whatever the next step of his plan his, and I’m not the one with control over the videos anyway. It’s very he-said-she-said/low-IQ/honor-system-with-angry-people, I’m ashamed of myself for having been involved in this dispute, I hadn’t recognized the bad side of his character earlier. In the end I think he’s just afraid that we tell his private thing in public, but the more he angers us, the more he risks one of us to leak it out of annoyance. That was 2 years ago, I would just like him to stop trying to find my address, but I’m not going to give him 15k€ either.

Just lowerclass problems.

On the other hand, if he does take you to court, you'll basically be forced to reveal publicly, on permanent record, the thing that you discovered about him. You really won't have a choice because they are going to ask you why you removed him, and you won't be able to lie.

> you won't be able to lie

Hmm. What percentage of claims in sworn testimony are intentional lies?

This is what happens with my open source Chrome extension's reviews on the Chrome Web Store. Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life.

Heh, it is totally possible to make money off extensions. You just need to provide value. Here are some examples:

- $100k with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/css-scan-made-over-100k-d6...

- $38k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/187-jordan-oconnor-of-c...

- $3.1k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/night-eye

- $2.5k/month with a browser extension: https://www.indiehackers.com/interview/weather-extension-ad9...

Not to mention Honey, which sold to PayPal for $4 billion.

> Not that you can really make money off of extensions even if I wanted to, but such is life.

Why not? There's successful projects selling or based around extensions.

Very common to see on the Chrome store and WordPress.org plugins repo.