What’s the difference between personal and commercial levels of support?

Personal subscriptions and licenses entitle the holder to create support tickets in the bug tracker, and to access software updates. If a personal subscriber or licensee has a suggestion to make for a product enhancement, we will gladly listen to it. Support issues are handled on a best-effort basis, which means that resolving them may take anywhere from a few hours to a few months, depending upon how busy staff is supporting commercial subscribers and licensees.

Commercial subscribers and licensees, in contrast, receive prioritized support. This doesn’t always mean that problems will be resolved overnight, but efforts are first put into resolving issues reported by commercial subscribers and licensees, and when product enhancements are requested, these go to the top of the stack when we are considering where to expend our development efforts. In essence, commercial customers hold more sway, and their needs are always a priority for us, generally because we understand that mission-critical processes may be hanging in the balance, whereas personal subscribers and licensees should be using the software in non-business, and thus, non-critical environments.

Note also that the included term of support for some products may differ for personal vs commercial subscriptions. An example of this is ArcaOS, where the personal edition includes 6 months of technical support and updates, whereas the commercial edition includes one full year (12 months) of technical support and updates.