A lot of people in the comments are saying he did it for "likes" - that's a pretty harsh reading of the article.

What I think a lot of people are missing is that the difference between supporting corporates who spend up to millions per year on your product and supporting end-users who are literlly counting every cent they spend is a huge gulf in terms of expectations, technical ability, professionalism.... the list goes on. It's a completely different game.

I thought the article was a brilliant summary of why you simply can't help all the users all the time. It's a hard lesson to learn in the world of Tech Support. We all want to be the knight is shining armour solving customer problems, but the skill to be able to say "no" in the right way is not universal.

To those ragging on the author - there are huge numbers of people who, even if you paid them to use your software, they would still complain and swear at you. It's just life. And dealing with the competing interests of customers, time pressures, personal sanity and many more is almost exactly the job description of Tech Support.

This was also my thought! OP is going to get a lot of arrows for this article, but it's a genuinely great write up that matches a lot of my experience with mass-market products.

It's a great account for people to reflect on. I've immediately sent this article to several early-stage founders who are burning astounding amounts of time on undesirable customers.

Everybody on HN knows better than OP how to run their own business and could absolutely please 100% of customers or potential customers 100% of the time. Apparently.

Idealism doesn't survive contact with reality.

Same here. I feel it's what every software owner thinks, but no one is willing to admit because of the backlash.