Why QuotaGuard Never Gave Up On Unscalable "Soft Limits"

A decade-plus of business later, the verdict is in...

The unscalable challenge of QuotaGuard’s Soft Limit Policy counterintuitively allowed QuotaGuard to grow even faster for over a decade and gain a faithful customer following.

I doubt Paul Graham was thinking about pricing plan limits when he penned his famous Do Things That Don’t Scale essay, but here we are regardless...

When QuotaGuard started back in 2012, we started with the idea of “soft limits” on customer usage plans. The idea was, if customer usage went over what they've pre-paid for, we manually intervened and delayed pausing the automatic suspension of their subscription. This gave customers time to upgrade, even though they were over their plan limits.

But let me tell ya, manual intervention is not f***ing scalable.

As QuotaGuard grew, Soft Limits became an unscalable task, yet still a good business practice for customers. Still, it became a huge burden on the smooth operation of the business and progressively got worse as each month got closer to the last days of the month. 

Fast forward 13 years -> Now Quotaguard has thousands and thousands of customers. A small subset of them blow through limits on a daily basis. That leaves us with the challenge of doing something that's completely unscalable at a really high repetitive cadence.

A few years ago, I considered dropping the soft limit promise. We could have switched to programmatically suspending customers any time their subscription usage exceeded their plan.

Fortunately, I re-read Paul’s article and took a little inspiration from it. I opted to continue intervening and allow the soft limits policy to stay.

Trust me - even after re-considering - there are still times where I've dreamed of just making it a hard limit. When customers hit that limit, the service would stop running until they upgraded. It felt like that would be more money, faster…

But the business owner in me just wouldn’t allow me to do that. Not because I'm some great person. But because I've seen how many customers have gone over their limits and needed a few days for an authorization to upgrade. Many times we're all so busy we don't even know we're in the red on our service limits.

It's rarely malicious or a case of customers trying to "pull one over on us".

They just needed to be informed and a little time.

By keeping the lights on, their sites and services never failed. The situation gave us a chance to speak with each of our customers about the issue, and as a result, QuotaGuard gained considerable trust and a favorable reputation with each of them.

Had we pragmatically suspended each customer - even if they immediately upgraded - their site or service still could have been down for hours. 

Instead of going that direction, the back-and-forth email communication about upgrading ended up cementing many of our best customer relationships. And those same customers ended up spending a lot of money with us over the years.

Our Soft Limit policy helps our customers see we're real human beings behind the scenes. Real people operating a real company to help them accomplish their business goals.

I’ve learned it’s always better to get in conversations with customers, even if the genesis of the discussion is something negative. The more both sides communicate, the stronger and more meaningful the relationship becomes.

That’s one of the reasons I don’t believe customer service goals should be to shorten ticketing solution times. It should be about solving the problem quickly and learning the customer use case, and deepening the relationship. That’s how QuotaGuard grew strong loyalty with our long-term customers. Much of that through the Soft Limit policy.

By creating that avenue of communication between my customers and my team, our Soft Limit policy allowed QuotaGuard to grow for a decade and create a faithful customer base. I can attest to hundreds of thousands of extra income based solely on the goodwill created by the soft limit policy and the conversations that resulted. 

Going back to one of my core principals, Always Be Reading, I’m reminded again of how much so much of my success has been the result of reading widely and continuously. If I wasn’t always reading and learning, I may never have come across Paul’s essay, much less come across it again years later.

Fortunately, I took Paul's advice so many years ago and ran with it...

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