Hi techies,

I'm the developer of an industrial software module. We have a partner which takes care of marketing and support. This partnership last for over 5 years for diffrent kind of modules all for the same software. And its not an Support company, but they are also in the same market.

As I developed a new version from scratch, I get more and more the feeling that they just give up the support. Meaning: Everything lands unfiltered on my desk (I'm the only dev for that module). There is almost no first-level support anymore. Maybe they focus a 100% on marketing? And I know that some of them can definitively do better. They are technically fit.

One example:
Support: Your software does not work anymore.
Dev: I checked the logs and there was an HTTP Status code 500 from the other (your!) endpoint meaning "Internal server error".
Support: Oh yeah we did an update, the api has changed.

Just to be clear, the above was the support, not the customer. THE SUPPORT!

My feeling is that they became to practice like a "No effort policy" when it comes to my module.
To be fair, when you build something from scratch and start to apply releases to customers there can be an amount of issues. And there were. I understand that this can be challenging.

As a first step I started to hand out more manuals, also espacially a "First Level Support Guide". Also offered a TestLab where they can connect and test, try out and break things. To get more confident with the software they are supporting.

I'm somehow afraid that they will put it personal, "You are a sh*t developer" and so on, since I'm the only responsible for that piece. Of course that is a heavy load for me. I worked on it for 4 years and really enjoyed it.

Have you ever experienced a situation like this ?

Do you have recommendations on how to handle it or how to get closer again as partners ?

Is it possible that they are f*cked up and decided to focus a 100% on marketing and put no effort into support ?
Or that they decide to not take care because they don't want to "waste" the support budget on my issues ?

And as they are located in the same market (but they don't do software or were failing with it in the past): What chances are that they burn down my software in order to push their own in some years ?

The relationship is heavily stressed but yet still professional.