For a minor explanation, support is just prohibitively expensive no matter what you do, and quite frankly the only people actually capable of support is going to be the devs who made the product for various bugs/issues, and that is just a handful of people, some of whom have left the company even.

Finding good support is also hard. I worked in product areas with dedicated support for paying customers, and the number of support staff that I would consider actually helpful is precisely 3 people, out of a few hundred. Those 3 people are paid a ton to keep them around, and while I don't know exactly what they're paid they usually get moved up and into a role that at minimum exceeds typical senior eng pay, the rest just bounce tickets back and forth collecting traces with at best a poor understanding of the product. On average no understanding.

Another problem is that a good support staff would probably do better to be a dev anyway, the knowledge required is pretty much the same, just missing development experience.

I've used a few SaaS products with decent support: AWS, GitLab, Microsoft (for certain products), Fortinet (for certain products)...

On the bad side I can think of Google and Databricks.

So it's not an unsolvable problem, there are people getting support right.

AWS support can be very hit or miss.

I've had experiences where they will claim that something is possible when it is absolutely not, and you have to provide a lot of supporting information to get them to see reality.

Ye support is in many cases a about as qualified role as building it. If not more qualified if the product is bad.

support cost is inversely prop to quality (code and design)

knowing code quality levels at those companies and how they replace actual designers with PMs... it was their goal to have the most expensive support!

A lot of people have forgotten that you can actually call companies and they do/will assist.

Called Walmart and they got extra bike racks installed at my location. Have had to call eBay a number of times as a small-time seller. PayPal too. Got Google to replace my chromecast remote and they went through thorough troubleshooting steps before RMAing it.

Of course, there are plenty of exceptions but not worth pretending that paid (by the vendor) support doesn’t exist.

I believed, until you said PayPal support was helpful. PayPal support is what I envision the DMV in Soviet Russia was like.

The outcome is support that makes you feel like you're bothering them, is barely concealing their hostility, lies about what's happening, and one wrong word and horrible, horrible things will happen to you.

That's PayPal support on the best of days, like after the support person just received a 20% raise, or had a baby. On the bad days...

In Soviet Russia you'd be lucky to deal with the DMV. For that you'd have to have a car, and the waiting list to buy one was years long.

- "We can deliver the car in ten years"

<Flips through calendar>

- "Sorry, I'll get my new dishwasher then"

I generally hate Paypal and will happily shit on them at any opportunity for all kinds of great reasons (cough, blatant theft of client funds for completely arbitrary reasons), I also don't trust them with anything but the as-temporary-as-possible storage of the least possible amount of payment funds when I have no other choice. However, weirdly, on the few occasions in which I've had to contact their customer support, they've been surprisingly friendly and helpful so far. But maybe I've just been lucky.