Anyways, don't expect their support to be there for long if they grow, like I said, initially the two devs Romain and the other person would respond in just a few hours. I experienced it myself. They won't be able to hire a ton of people for support as the service costs too little already with small profits and paying a good wage in countries like the US/CA where they operate. Yeah it would probably take away their profits from thousands of users requiring a price hike that would get a backlash. People literally complained about direct support because it was using a Third party chat service and they lost it. I don't mind it but generally as a service grows, either the price will change to accommodate for more hires, or the service will try to do it's best with what it has trying to be more accessible. NextDNS pricing is already quite low so, it would be illogical to hire more people and either make it even or at a loss if they don't raise prices.

juliank That company is also a VPN provider thus giving them more headroom in terms of what they can lose and their profit margins. This might help in the short term as they came out of beta and are trying to advertise their service. But sooner or later, they need to make good profits that's simply how a business operates. Google doesn't give search results for free, Google gives the search results in hopes of Advertising and other revenue streams growing. There are better and worse companies but no matter the service, they all need to make profits and a good amount that is to upscale and maintain the same quality.

To simplify, NextDNS is a DNS service, that's their only source of revenue and their main goal.

The service you're using is a VPN company branching out to DNS, just as most tech companies do, they could go with lose money, grow and think later option. It's valid for them as they have another source of income. But it won't be something that continues for too long. 

juliank A support representative that's fairly hired would probably need the same cost as a few good servers in some locations. Again, they are a growing service, they need to be at their best to scale up and they can do that with additional funding. But when the growth stops, it is going to naturally scale back as they would need to maintain their service and improve it to stay up-to date with competition and wouldn't want to add a lot of additional costs on support that rarely needed when you put the entire userbase in mind. 

For the pricing, if you check Reddit and a few other forums, people were complaining about 2 dollars saying that it's too expensive and the prices should be cut. You want to pay more for example. I'm in a country with a worse economy, 4 dollars is a lot so, now that would make less sense to me and I wouldn't be happy I'm not even giving an example, a dollar here is a lot so doubling the price would hurt me directly. What sucks is that everyone has their own points of view and satisfying everyone is virtually impossible lol, I really wish them good luck on that.

My logic is that, if I was running the service I would make the same choice. This is a website for support so we see a lot of people having problems. But compare that to all the people that are happily using the service without issues. The people having issues are a quite small percentage.

Now thinking about how NextDNS absorbed the DNS surge with Facebook in that example and how they said that it was hitting 60% from what I remember of their total capacity. That means that their infrastructure is capable of close to 3x or more queries than normal as a guarantee of service and stability. Now that's amazing for the users like myself, I didn't use NextDNS on my router but when that happened. Nearly every DNS service failed, ISPs and even some big named aka Adguard went down. Changing my DNS to NextDNS made my internet perfectly usable while my ISP struggled for about a day and a half trying to fix it. I was the only one with internet on the whole apartment. That costs a lot, logically speaking. And gives all the users additional trust on the service. I know that it won't go down or have issues and haven't had problems on my end ever since I started using it. But everything costs money. It's really hard to find a logical solution.

If they for example made a higher price tier with special support. We would feel bad and people would complain about them being greedy and giving support directly only when people pay more. It's so complicated that, honestly. I'm happy that I have nothing to do with any large scale business. I'm currently getting ready for University and dang, I want to work somewhere instead of owning a company.

This isn't to blame you or anything. Just trying to show that there are a ton of complications and so many additinla problems that it's hard to do such simple stuff when you have to take every single outcome into account. I'm just a student that's thinking, they probably have far more things that they would have to think about to do what you'd like.