[indigochill]

>my Hacker Brain things this project _should_ have a free plan, because free plans are nice and good and neat.

I agree free stuff is neat. I think the other side of the hacker ethos is "figure it out yourself", so I would never expect someone who hacked something together and shared it for free to then provide support for said thing. That's cool if you want to do it, but seems like asking for burnout unless you really like the support side or perhaps are looking at turning it from a free thing into a business, as you seem to be.

[hndamien]

When somebody from free needs support, wouldn't that be a good time to "Upgrade for support or reach us on Twitter"

[indigochill]

Depends on the person providing the thing. If you're ready to build some revenue from your thing, then yeah, upselling free customers when they need support seems like the natural thing to do.

However, there's another breed of hackers that enjoys making things more than they enjoy making money from things they make (which involves a different set of skills and interests). In which case, it's also valid to just say, "Sorry it's hard, but I can't commit to formal support."

[jmduke]

Yeah, I think you did a better job of describing my dichotomy than I did. The galaxy brain corollary, though, is that if I get _too_ many folks who are asking for free-tier support, it means I can't support everyone at the level I'd like to; sort of a microscopic version of the OSS labor crisis.