Idk. It’s totally ok to just ignore those types of requests. Even a lot of the requests the author was getting. They’re just fishing and there’s Practically zero chance they’ll even ever follow up to see why you never responded.
Mega corporations get away with awful support of paying customers, people don’t actually expect you to jump at their command as a startup or even as a toy side project. If you’re able to ignore a beggar on the street, you should be able to ignore a lot of these emails. Stop guilting yourself into a heavy administrative burden and don’t avoid consumer apps because of that fear.
I get it but main thing is you should know that's a choice and it shouldn't be a requirement/burden. For the common things I think I'd just setup an autoreply that said something like;
Thanks for your message, please know that we are limited on time and only respond to critical issues. However, also please know that we do eventually read and monitor these emails;
- Bug reports or issues on our current application: we will respond within a week, usually within 2 days
- Feature requests: we are unable to confirm when or if a feature will be added. We typically put it on a log and review them quarterly.
- Requests for source code or how our tool was built: we're glad you're curious however we do not share this information.
Taking up to a week to respond to a bug report sounds like a long time. I would wonder that anyone would bother to submit a bug report if they think they might have to wait a week to get a response. But I guess its acceptable, if you set customer expectations accordingly.
A week can be a long time, even 2 days might. If you want to respond sooner that's great, they will likely be pleasantly surprised. However, for those times when you're offline for the weekend or on holiday for a week - the messaging helps you out with no extra effort to update it. Always better to under promise and over deliver in my book.
I also think expectations are relayed based on the price and scale of your business. Being transparent about your operations is helpful. If you're running your business as a one person side project but pretending to be a large multinational corporation (which is common) or charging a larger sum of money for service then perhaps it's expected. Also if you're providing some mission critical application, then probably expected. The author is talking about a charting plugin to a trading app that he charges peanuts for and has no intention of continuing development on. I think most people's "businesses" fall into this camp, even if mildly revenue generating. In any case, it's mostly about setting and managing expectations. It helps if you are transparent if you are not actively making improvements or it's just a hobby/solo/side hustle thing for you. At the end of the day, they can decide if they want to discontinue using your thing or not and if your optimizing for "least amount of time invested" then you also just need to come to accept that some churn is the price of it. Obviously, if you can charge more or have a huge amount of users, that churn becomes negative ROI versus providing more attentive support and that would likely justify a change of strategy - for some.
Mega corporations get away with awful support of paying customers, people don’t actually expect you to jump at their command as a startup or even as a toy side project. If you’re able to ignore a beggar on the street, you should be able to ignore a lot of these emails. Stop guilting yourself into a heavy administrative burden and don’t avoid consumer apps because of that fear.