

Ask HN: How to deal with all of these customer requests? - jasonmiles

I run a small software as a service company, and customers constantly make requests like "my old software put X in a black border, but yours doesn't. Can you put a black border around it for me?" or "on the dashboard I see X-Y-Z, but I hate looking at Z. Please hide it for me."<p>I don't like telling the customer "no", but at the same time, I don't like to muddy up the code with all of these one-off changes for specific customers. Also, a lot of these changes are typically not worth the effort to generalize enough for other customers to use (e.g. having a setting to hide Z, or a setting to turn on a border, etc).<p>Note that these customers are paying a decent amount of money (like $1,000/mo), so it isn't always that easy to just tell them "not gonna happen" especially if it is a seemingly simple change.<p>I'm sure this is very common in business, so how do you deal with these customer requests without 1) pissing off your customers and 2) making the codebase unmanageable?
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tamersalama
Some ideas:

Change the pricing model, with say a lower retainer and a higher cost of
change. When the client knows it's going to cost them $$ to change that border
they would think thoroughly whether this is a value worth pursuing.

Offer a re-visit to the app after few months if usage where you can address
all if the requests together, and maybe outsource it (as it's not core to
you).

