Paid support for the masses?

[gnunicorn]

Note, in the spirit of #27, I'd like to state that I believe the following proposal to be primarily of interest for developer-facing, company independent solo-developers, small- and mid-size projects with a few clear leaders -- not so much django and reactjs, but more pouchdb and redux.

I am a little surprised to find very little discussions here about this, so I thought to start a new ticket discussing a good old classic of OS development funding: paid support and consulting - but with a twist: updated to the age of the internet.

Unlike proposal #34 (which is great!!), which aims to the low-volume-high-margin enterprise market, I am thinking about of providing support for the many, many smaller companies, which need help using our software, but currently can't "buy" support for them.

As a simple example, take a freelance gig I had recently, in which I had to struggle with some rather peculiar webpack-setup. If I had told my client "Sure, I can spend another week fiddling with this, or you could just buy this 200$-monthly subscription from the webpack team and they will tell us within 3 days, if and how this can be done", they'd have bought it in a heart-beat. But that option wasn't on the table, though I think there are many cases like this, where a developer working on a thing, could easily convince their company to spend a couple of hundred bugs to get their problem sorted.

I've thought about this a lot recently, including a concrete, practical proposal, which I will share later. But first I wanted to open the discussion about the pro's and cons of offering paid support and consulting for OS projects more general. Thoughts?

[gnunicorn]

(Sorry, if you received a half done text. I was writing this on my phone and accidentally hit send too early!)

[ncoghlan]

Tidelift are pursuing an idea along these lines by offering a "business model as a service" platform: https://tidelift.com/about/lifter