Hah. See, I look at it from the perspective where spending... just about any effort on a single customer makes them unprofitable. So yeah, if someone is a big complainer (and they complain about things that I don't think are problems for everyone) I try to get them a refund and into a competitor as gently as possible. But, I still mostly agree with the article.

For example, there is much price competition in my market. Yes, you increase your resources per dollar over time. Moore's law, and more to the point, your competitors are doing it. But, you can't just give the new, better deal to your new customers, you have to give that new, better deal to your existing customers, first. Linode has been famous for this for a while. Last time I lowered prices on my front page, I actually reduced the dollars I charged existing customers, which is even more unusual. Normally, you keep the dollars the same and just give them more resources. As an aside, I'm way behind, price-wise, right now. My plan is to keep the dollars charged the same, and just give customers more ram/disk, as is traditional. (I've upgraded maybe 1/4 of my customers to my first upgrade level. I suspect I may need to go further than that, though.)

I've watched several (ex) competitors give new customers better deals than existing customers... and it just doesn't work at scale, when your per-customer margin is razor thin.