alt Hacker News> 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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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.
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.