[coder1001]

Startup idea for anyone who is interested:

Paid customer service where the customer pays money (say $100-$1k depending on how serious the issue is) and each company can have a special channel to respond to these paid requests and be compensated (say 80% of the fee the customer pays). That way companies will have the will and ability to attend to serious issues and filter them out from the "useless" customer requests that flood any large size business.

[dragonwriter]

The companies that want to sell dedicated support and the people who want to buy it are already selling and buying it. And since, outside of FOSS that the customer controls hosting of, and some other special cases, only the original vendor, with whom the user will have interacted to get the software, will be able to provide support, so there's not a lot of matchmaking/discovery to be done to justify a middleman taking a cut.

[pjc50]

This is how the Microsoft paid support channel works: https://support.microsoft.com/en-gb/help/4341255/support-for...

[mmkos]

In the UK and least there exists a service like that - resolver.co.uk. I have used it once and got a response from the company that I complained about. I thought that was rather neat.