Support will eat your week if you let it. As the solo developer, you’re also the support team, and every unstructured Slack DM or email is an interruption that breaks your flow. The fix isn’t hiring — it’s putting a queue between you and the interruption.

Get support out of your inbox

Email feels like the easy default and it’s the worst tool for this. Nothing is tracked, nothing is searchable, and every reply-all thread buries the one you actually need to answer. Move to something built for support the day you get your fifth real ticket:

• Plain or Missive — built for small dev-tool teams, with a shared inbox that looks and feels like Slack.
• Help Scout — the safe, boring choice. Good search, good tagging, easy to set up in an afternoon.
• A shared Slack/Discord channel + a bot that turns messages into tickets if you already live in chat and don’t want a second tool.

The one requirement: whatever you pick needs a status per ticket (open, waiting, closed) and search. If you can’t find “that thing someone asked about refunds three weeks ago,” you’ll answer it from scratch every time.

Write the answer once, then link to it

The first time someone asks a real question, answer it well — then immediately turn that answer into a docs page or FAQ entry. The second time it comes up, you paste a link and add one sentence of context. This is the single biggest lever for keeping support from scaling with your user count.

Q: does this work with the free tier?
A: [link to pricing page — see the "Free tier" row]. Free tier caps
   at 1k requests/mo; upgrade if you're hitting that.

Track which questions repeat. If you’re answering the same thing three times in a month, it belongs in the docs, not in your reply history.

Set response-time expectations, then hit them

You don’t need 24/7 support. You need a number you actually meet. “We reply within one business day” beats “we’re usually pretty fast” — vague promises get measured against whatever the user imagined, and they always imagined faster than you meant. Put the number on your support page and in your auto-reply.

Thanks for reaching out. I read every message and reply within
1 business day (usually faster). If this is urgent — service down,
data loss — put URGENT in the subject and I'll see it first.

Batch it instead of reacting to it

Interruption-driven support is the thing that actually kills a solo dev’s week, not the total time spent. Check the queue twice a day — late morning, late afternoon — instead of every time a notification fires. Turn off push notifications for the support tool entirely. A ticket that waits three hours for a reply costs you nothing; a ticket that breaks your focus mid-debugging session costs you the rest of the afternoon.

Say no to scope creep disguised as support

“Can you also add X” is a feature request wearing a support ticket’s clothes. Answer it honestly and separately:

Good idea — that’s not on the roadmap right now, but I’ve logged it. Current workaround is [Y] if that unblocks you.

Don’t let it turn into unpaid consulting. If someone needs real customization, that’s a conversation about a contract, not a free support thread.

The one tool worth paying for early

A canned-response library. Every support tool above has one. Build a library of 10-15 answers to your actual recurring questions — billing, exports, the one bug everyone hits — and you’ll answer most tickets in under 30 seconds instead of retyping the same paragraph. This is the highest-leverage thing you can set up in your first week of having real users, and it costs nothing but the time to write the answers once.

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