A week can be a long time, even 2 days might. If you want to respond sooner that's great, they will likely be pleasantly surprised. However, for those times when you're offline for the weekend or on holiday for a week - the messaging helps you out with no extra effort to update it. Always better to under promise and over deliver in my book.
I also think expectations are relayed based on the price and scale of your business. Being transparent about your operations is helpful. If you're running your business as a one person side project but pretending to be a large multinational corporation (which is common) or charging a larger sum of money for service then perhaps it's expected. Also if you're providing some mission critical application, then probably expected. The author is talking about a charting plugin to a trading app that he charges peanuts for and has no intention of continuing development on. I think most people's "businesses" fall into this camp, even if mildly revenue generating. In any case, it's mostly about setting and managing expectations. It helps if you are transparent if you are not actively making improvements or it's just a hobby/solo/side hustle thing for you. At the end of the day, they can decide if they want to discontinue using your thing or not and if your optimizing for "least amount of time invested" then you also just need to come to accept that some churn is the price of it. Obviously, if you can charge more or have a huge amount of users, that churn becomes negative ROI versus providing more attentive support and that would likely justify a change of strategy - for some.
I also think expectations are relayed based on the price and scale of your business. Being transparent about your operations is helpful. If you're running your business as a one person side project but pretending to be a large multinational corporation (which is common) or charging a larger sum of money for service then perhaps it's expected. Also if you're providing some mission critical application, then probably expected. The author is talking about a charting plugin to a trading app that he charges peanuts for and has no intention of continuing development on. I think most people's "businesses" fall into this camp, even if mildly revenue generating. In any case, it's mostly about setting and managing expectations. It helps if you are transparent if you are not actively making improvements or it's just a hobby/solo/side hustle thing for you. At the end of the day, they can decide if they want to discontinue using your thing or not and if your optimizing for "least amount of time invested" then you also just need to come to accept that some churn is the price of it. Obviously, if you can charge more or have a huge amount of users, that churn becomes negative ROI versus providing more attentive support and that would likely justify a change of strategy - for some.