> Ultimately, dealing with people who don't pay for your product is not fun.

I find it the other way around. I feel a bit embarrassed and stressed out working with people who have paid for a copy of software I've made (which admittedly is rather rare). When they haven't paid, every exchange is about what's best for humanity and the public in general, i.e. they're not supposed to get some special treatment at the expense of anyone else, and nobody has a right to lord over the other party.

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StopDisinfo910 7 hours ago | parent | next [-]

People who paid for your software don't really have a right to lord you around. You can chose to be accommodating because they are your customers but you hold approximately as much if not more weight in the relationship. They need your work. It's not so much special treatment as it is commissioned work.

People who don't pay are often not really invested. The relationship between more work means more costs doesn't exist for them. That can make them quite a pain in my experience.

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darkwater 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm probably projecting the idea I have of myself here but if someone says

> every exchange is about what's best for humanity and the public in general

it means that they are the kind of individual who deeply care for things to work, relationships to be good and fruitful and thus if they made someone pay for something, they think they must listen to them and comply their requests, because well, they are a paying customer and the customer is always right, they gave me their money etc etc

	▲	StopDisinfo910 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		There is no tension there. You can care about the work and your customer will still setting healthy boundaries and accepting that wanting to do good work for them doesn't mean you are beside them. Business is fundamentally about partnership, transactional and moneyed partnerships, but partnership still. It's best when both suppliers and customers are aware of that and like any partnership, it structured and can be stopped by both partners. You don't technically owe them more than what's in the contract and that puts a hard stop which is easy to identify if needed.

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account42 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Legally speaking, accepting payment makes it very clear that there is a contract under which you have obligations, both explicitly spelled out and implied.

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berkes 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You can achieve something like this with a pricing strategy.

As DHH and Jason Fried discuss in both the books REWORK, It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work, and their blog:

> The worst customer is the one you can’t afford to lose. The big whale that can crush your spirit and fray your nerves with just a hint of their dissatisfaction.

(It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work)

> First, since no one customer could pay us an outsized amount, no one customer’s demands for features or fixes or exceptions would automatically rise to the top. This left us free to make software for ourselves and on behalf of a broad base of customers, not at the behest of any single one. It’s a lot easier to do the right thing for the many when you don’t fear displeasing a few super customers could spell trouble.

(https://signalvnoise.com/svn3/why-we-never-sold-basecamp-by-...)

But, this mechanism proposed by DHH and Fried only remove differences amongst the paying-customers. I Not between "paying" and "non-paying".

I'd think, however, there's some good ideas in there to manage that difference as well. For example to let all the customers, paying- or not-paying go through the exact same flow for support, features, bugs, etc. So not making these the distinctive "drivers" why people would pay. E.g. "you must be paying customer to get support". Obviously depends on the service, but maybe if you have other distinctive features that people would pay for (e.g. hosted version) that could work out.

	▲	jcgl 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I think this is a good point and a true point. However, I understood GP's mention of "embarrassment" to speak more to their own feelings of responsibility. Which would be more or less decoupled from the pressure that a particular client exerts.