In reply to Louis Reingold.

Louis,

The questions depend largely on the theme. Most of our themes are limited in options, so generally speaking we don't get a lot of support questions. But, many people don't read the manual, as you can imagine, so sometimes it's just linking them to the appropriate documentation. Sometimes they ask us questions about something we failed to document, so we add that to our documentation.

Sometimes people have questions about how to customize things, which we usually don't cover in support, but occasionally we do depending on the circumstances.

Sometimes people just generally don't understand the WordPress user interface, and while that might not technically fall under our domain, we like to help the people that help us.

Sometimes they find a conflict with a plugin that is stomping on our styles, or maybe a plugin update broke something (https://github.com/Automattic/jetpack/issues/1253). We help them address it even though it might not be our technical problem. In the case of the linked issue, we finally did our own workaround because the lack of movement on that ticket.

Sometimes they have questions related to another plugin. For example, if they're using an ecommerce theme, they might ask us questions that are really related to the plugin. But, customers don't always know the difference. They don't always make distinctions between what the theme is doing and what a plugin is doing. It serves the customer, us, and the greater community to provide support and education in these cases.

We find that most people don't have support questions after the first few months. Obviously some people do, but most don't. Renewable support options are great in these cases. It's a common concept and model in other software industries, and it's nice to see it becoming a norm in the WordPress software world.