I’m by no means a marketing expert, but showing your early users respect, courtesy, and-dare I say it-loyalty, seems intuitive to me but also less and less common in today’s Anything As A Service (pronounced like “ass”) tech environment. I don’t miss months-long sales cycles, prohibitive up-front costs, oppressive support contracts, etc., but I do miss having companies that will bend over backward to retain long-time customers. Everything has become a transaction, and every customer is just a fraction of a company’s overall revenue. I’m not dissing GitLab as I am not (yet) a paying customer, just commenting on the state of software in general.
