Nobody pays for support if they remotely think they will not need it.

Maybe in your experience. Virtually every company I've worked for or with in the last 2-3 decades (mostly enterprise shops to be fair) paid for support on critial infrastructure like VMware. Most of them are required to by various contract or regulatory requirement (like the Very Large Financial I'm at now). The tiny number of shops I worked with that blew off support were 1) SMB, and 2) run by idiots. YMMV.

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b3lvedere a day ago | parent [-]

Agree. It's my experience and most of those are small businesses.

	▲	mixermachine a day ago \| parent [-]
		As soon any certification is required for the business the chapter SLA (service level agreements) comes up. Basically every business that is medium to large has to pass some kind of certification. Most of them will pay for an annual support contract because the SLA chapter forces them to have some kind of measure to recover from architecture problems.