Unfortunately, support models only work for a limited set of software. It happens to work for Red Hat.
For a while, we tried making money off support contracts for Phusion Passenger. The amount of money we made with that put us far below minimum wage. It turns out that with Phusion Passenger, nobody needs good support. Some people may have trouble setting it up (mostly people who are not familiar with Unix, and don't have money for a support contract anyway) but for the vast majority of users, Phusion Passenger just works and never stops working. By making our software stable and user friendly, we were essentially shooting ourselves in the foot revenue-wise.
We didn't want to cripple Phusion Passenger to make more money off support, so we ended up selling Phusion Passenger Enterprise which only differentiates on features, not stability. This latter model turns out to be far more successful and has skyrocketed open source development to new highs.
For almost 20 years I've had this problem with "give away open source, sell the support," because I thought if it works well people don't need support.
I've learned a lot in those 20 years that made me realize that it's not that simple, but stories like yours make me keep coming back to it.
On the other hand, how hard have you tried to market support contracts?
We at Akvo couldn't do what we do if we just lived of support. We run the software as a service and charge money for it. We have some advantages that makes it possible to do this. But only support wouldn't work for us.
For a while, we tried making money off support contracts for Phusion Passenger. The amount of money we made with that put us far below minimum wage. It turns out that with Phusion Passenger, nobody needs good support. Some people may have trouble setting it up (mostly people who are not familiar with Unix, and don't have money for a support contract anyway) but for the vast majority of users, Phusion Passenger just works and never stops working. By making our software stable and user friendly, we were essentially shooting ourselves in the foot revenue-wise.
We didn't want to cripple Phusion Passenger to make more money off support, so we ended up selling Phusion Passenger Enterprise which only differentiates on features, not stability. This latter model turns out to be far more successful and has skyrocketed open source development to new highs.