A free user cost us $4,000 in support time. How do you handle overly demanding free tiers?

Like most SaaS startups, we offer a free tier. We thought it was a great way to build goodwill, get feedback, and let people test the product before upgrading.

But last month, I finally sat down and looked at our support desk analytics. One single free user had opened 32 support tickets over the course of three weeks.

They weren't reporting bugs. They were asking us to walk them through how to use Excel, asking for custom API endpoints, and requesting that we build a specific feature just for their use case. I spent hours on Zoom calls with them and writing detailed custom scripts for their workflow. When I calculated the time my small team spent helping them against our hourly burn rate, it was roughly $4,000 of pure support cost.

And at the end of it all? They refused to upgrade to our $29/month paid plan because "the free version does everything I need now."

I realized we had created a monster. Our free tier was so generous, and our support so responsive, that we were essentially acting as a free consulting agency for people who had zero intention of ever paying us. It’s making my team miserable and it’s killing our unit economics.

For those who have scaled SaaS: How do you set boundaries on support for free users without looking like the "bad guy"?

Do you cut off support entirely for free tiers, limit them to email only, or just point them to the documentation? I need to figure out how to protect my team's time without alienating the people who might actually upgrade later.