“Why did it take you so long to answer my question” , “I just wanted a quick answer why are you charging me for 20 minutes of support”. Human time spent on support is not as cut and dry as hosting resources used, so I imagine it’s easier to not have that discussion. Also 5$ would be like 15 mins of any qualified persons time, so really you’re not paying much.
>Also 5$ would be like 15 mins of any qualified persons time, so really you’re not paying much.
Be less minutes than that I dare say. $20 an hour tech costs, then you have overheads and that's without a profit margin. I'd say 5 mins be more closer to the mark. Really gets down to how many support calls you have as if you have a couple admins who have to dip into a support queue, then their hourly rate would be higher. However if you have a nice frontline 1st line support pool with 2nd and 3rd for escalation model/scale then it will get cheaper.
That all said you have to factor in how much support they use and maybe your average user will need one or two tickets a year and then at the other end you the types who fail to read FAQ's and end up needing more support to use their computer, let alone the service and blur the lines contacting you for an issue that after some back and forth turns out to be the user's end. Those will be costly. So you balance things out - and go with the average and yet at the same time, dread some types of customers.
from experience, i can tell you high end support far exceeds $20/h (think 3rd level network and systems support).
$20/h is more in the 1st line territory.
Not just SV, but almost anywhere in the US at this point I would imagine. I was working support in the Phoenix area back in the mid-90s' and it paid roughly 2-3x minimum wage at that time. While the ratio wouldn't be the same, a lot of places now have a minimum wage in the $9-12 range. Given that, $20/hr+ wouldn't be improbable for first line email/phone support.
A couple of years ago I took a break from IT to work first-line support at a local (midwestern) software company. Hourly rate was just a little over that minimum wage range, nothing near $20hr though. I was glad to get it, glad for the experience, and glad to go back to IT when my time was up.
In all fairness, support costs also include all of the techs' phones, computers, networking, software licenses for Teamviewer et al, and office overhead. So a $20/hr bill is pretty cheap for a minimum wage technician.
> "Paid support must be opt-in. Whatever we do with paid support should have no effect on the 80-95% of people who don’t use it."
I assume that includes "when the tech has no tickets, they /do not/ work on anything that would improve the service for everyone"?
> "Essentially, if you want support, you’re not really paying for the answer to a question. You’re paying for somebody who knows what the heck they’re doing to be there when you have a question"
Often no, what I need from support is something I could technically do or am willing to work out, but cannot because it needs to be done on your side of the customer/business security boundary, or needs information from your side of it. e.g. the difference between support resets passwords vs self-service password resets.
This is covered down at the end of the comments in a list of recent support examples, many of them can be potentially fixed by the customers who are using the support as a consultancy service, but a couple cannot. Take password resets, you can design your company to have a self-service one or not at your choice and a good self-service one will mean fewer support requests. Thus, if you charge for support, it would incentivise you to have no self-service reset so that you can get support money for salaries. But you need to pay salaries either way because you need some techs available to run the service, and to provide support-as-consultancy.
> "Although there is a distinct response time benefit to subscribing before you need support, we do expect that a nontrivial number of people will wait until the first time they need support to subscribe. Leaving the first month at $5.00 helps protect us in that scenario."
1. There are parts of the system customers cannot get to, cannot find out about, which can go wrong, so there is the risk of every customer needing support at some point. 2) People who willingly pay a support subscription also go times when they aren't using that support. 3. The people paying for the support and not using it are subsidising the retainer fee of the technical employees being still available when the other peolpe waiting until they need support to subscribe have something still around to subscribe to. 4. Technical people employed and not doing support can do things to benefit all customers.
It only makes sense to include the cost in the fees charged to everyone. It can still be prioritised by inverse usage, or etc.
There are three main problems with pay-as-you-go support based on time. All three come down to support being provided by people:
1) Unlike software objects, it is not yet possible to instantiate qualified support personnel as needed.
2) Unlike virtual machines, people get very cranky if you attempt to suspend them to disk or delete them to save resources when not in use.
3) Unlike physical hardware, uploading large volumes of data to people so they can produce useful output is extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive.
Here's a more serious answer:
When you seek (qualified) support, you're not paying for the time it takes the person to type the right answer; you're paying for them to know the right answer. (See also: https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/know-where-man/)
It took us quite a while to figure that out, and we tried pay-as-you-go support along the way, as someone linked below. l-lousy correctly guessed the outcome of that: more time spent arguing with people about how much we charged them for support than providing support.
Worse, that's how the person providing support makes their (minimal) income: by nickels and dimes and on other people's schedules. So, if you're doing that job, you're making very little money and frequently dealing with angry people due to a system you have no control over.
It's the tech support version of being an Amazon delivery driver. Amazon may be cool with treating people like that, but I'm not.
One detail l-lousy did get wrong (as others observe) is the 15 minutes. $5 is 5 minutes or less of a qualified person's time.
That does assume people want qualified support and not first-tier "I can't be bothered to search the FAQ, read me the right one!" interactions.
Usually, but by no means always, that's a reasonable assumption for us. People looking for that level of hand-holding tend to be much more successful with other hosting services with multiple tiers of support and (usually) phone support.
I guess for small shops, a steady stream of income to pay a support person's salary is more important than the benefits of hourly billing like fairness and possible higher income.
