My thought is that for any business-critical service, you need to have bought the service from person-to-person sales channels. Many boring meetings where they walk you through a slideshow of their service even though you already have it working. Many meetings worth of negotiating a price that's 10x the off-the-shelf price. All instead of, you know, making your product. It's just the cost of doing business -- $5/user/month if you're ok with them shutting you down because of a malfunctioning cron job, $30,000/year + meetings if you want someone's email that has to look into your problem. That's how software is these days, and unfortunately, literally everyone wants a piece. No task is too trivial to justify a 5 figure yearly cost, it seems. (Most recently, a well-known company tried to get that much out of me for hosting a static website!) There doesn't seem to be any market pressure to correct this problem, and I don't really understand why, but someone stands to make a lot of money if they crack the code. In the meantime, there's you and a problem, and giving the vendor your time and money can get the problem resolved. (Yup, you have to reward someone that's wronged you, because you already wrote code against their proprietary API. That's just how it is these days, and you have to accept it if you want to get anything done.)
I agree with the other comments that relaying phishing to internal users is probably what they dislike. There, of course, isn't a good solution beyond using some open platform. Your self-hosted IRC server isn't going to cancel your account because someone sent a phishing link, for example. But, nobody will know how to connect to it anyway. Sigh!
Makes total sense. If you buy a subscription for few dollars/month, don't expect a human being to answer your call. Google/Twillio/Sendgrid, whatever the service, all the same ticketing system and no real answer.
HN crowd looks down on sales reps. But a good sales rep will 1) understand your business 2) will look for ways to match your needs to solutions they offer 3) will be your point of contact when things go wrong.
Sales reps are human beings, treat them well, thank them for their time if you don't buy the fancy/expensive enterprise plan.They'll understand.
Most reps are young college grads that are building a network for life.
You could be a solo SaaS creator and cheap because it is a side gig and your don't have the money. But still make an effort to nurture those little young reps. One day they'll make the phone call to somebody that will remove that account suspension. That will save your business.
I've dealt with several web hosting companies that had fully human operators respond very nicely when I had a problem even though my monthly hosting fees were tiny, rarely more than $20 per month. It's not impossible to offer a low cost service and still avoid being an unresponsive piece of shit to clients.
Also Google treats businesses like this if they have profiles on their maps. A business might rely on their google maps profile for 100k+ in revenue, but they can't get someone from google on the phone to help deal with it. I had someone steal my google maps listing from me and they got away with it because google would not connect with me about it. It was horrible and it was wrong.
> If you buy a subscription for few dollars/month, don't expect a human being to answer your call.
For a "few" dollars a month, maybe not.
But here the OP said it was around $600/month, so that's a fairly substantial chunk of ongoing spend, just to have zero way to contact someone on the phone on a showstopper problem that needs fixing ASAP.
Contrast with more traditional businesses like PG&E or Comcast. Both hated companies for reasons, but even so they are heads and shoulders above these cloud provider companies (google/twilio/etc) in terms of customer support.
I spend way less than $600 with each (around $100 for my small office) and yet I can immediately reach a human on the phone if there's any problem with my electric or internet service.
I kind of agree with this. I need to have that point-of-contact, so that if something blows up, they don't want to lose their commission, so they email the right person in the company to get it fixed.
The thing is, I actually had this when I first started with them. They were so small at the time, that I had one of the founders on the phone once and he told me all about how he studied cloud computing at MIT. But this was over 10 years ago. After that, they had phone support for a long time.
Last few years they changed over to this way where there is no path to resolving a problem like this, which should be easy to solve, in an appropriate amount of time.
I agree with the other comments that relaying phishing to internal users is probably what they dislike. There, of course, isn't a good solution beyond using some open platform. Your self-hosted IRC server isn't going to cancel your account because someone sent a phishing link, for example. But, nobody will know how to connect to it anyway. Sigh!