For the low price of £50/user/month you can get the Small Business Experience where support is a potentially-human chatbot and you must pray they do not alter their API, features or pricing any further!

The problem is that business don't really know the difference between 'support' and support. Sometimes what could very easily be some relatively simple custom software, or a suitably customised open-source solution, ends up becoming a house of cards of SaaS providers and having to manage all these additional points of failure. Or even in cases where there's no added complexity, when the business see's 'support', they think 'when warehouse system no work phone provider and man in suit will fix', or even just 'some support must be better than no support with open-source!'.

But then I've seen huge amounts of money being spent on external providers with a good image who will implement non-standard solutions and have inadequate support, if you're lucky they may have a forum which feels like victims looking out for each other. Or they implement an open-source or otherwise widely-used solution, then proceed to modify it in the most bizarre, ungodly and proprietary ways, provide no documentation, and often remove some of the ways you may be able to redeem it in the honest goal of 'simplifying the UI'. One of these was a booking system where I used to work. Something so standard with many ways we could implement it. It ended up getting done as part of a local company doing the website, because they showed up with a few guys and a presentation, they offer support, great, they're the website people! What you actually get are weeks of furious emails because something is broken, no meaningful documentation or technical information going on, but the same dudes in suits have turned up and had 2 meetings about it, until me and my friend are off the production line and picking through the incomprehensible, uncommented shit that abused WordPress to such an extent that meant pretty much any changes to the site had to be done via edits to this code, and we can't even get support on Reddit because this is bespoke garbage. Ultimately, we were able to determine that the names of the events cannot be changed using the UI, the way that users were told to make changes to all other content on the site, due to the code that displays the booking product info + booking calendar does so by displaying the info of a particular SKU, which it looks for by looking for a fucking item description string! I guess they just thought we'd never change any of our event product names, add new ones, or fix the capitalisation error in one of the product names, which is what caused it to break!

Sometimes it is the business not really understanding that they're not willing to pay enough for the kind of support they envision, what they are able to pay for is basically solo-dev level of support, but even some support must be better than no support, right? But even when they do pay top-dollar, and are legitimately trying to do the right thing by seemingly reducing responsibility and workload on an already overstretched IT, they can still ultimately get crappy support that does nothing to reduce the workload! I knew their support would be shit because there's not enough margin in it to pay for both good support and 3 briefcase bois rocking up in 3 separate cars to ~~make the sale~~ do the consultation! But small businesses are really vulnerable to Terminal Technical Deficit when they lose the experience needed to know who's tech advice they should take, who they should consult with, who they should employ. We should listen to advice, but at the same time everyone knows better than their mechanic's advice because they're just trying to sell them parts, and there's a lot more bullshit-merchants in this industry than there are running repair shops!

But pretty much any online service where you're not big enough of a customer to be 'partner' or get a point of contact just boils down to arbitrary limitations, lack of any kind of 'business logic', a support bot and a forum. The feature you need is a simple export or minor customisation to make something work and you find that it's the most upvoted feature suggestion and has been for the last 6 years. You can't talk to anyone and when shit goes wrong you can only speculate on the forums with the 1,000 kindred souls in the same boat.