I worked for a summer at a managed service provider that was a certified partner of Microsoft, Cisco, HP, etc. The level of service you get as a (technical) business partner is unbelievable compared to what you get as a consumer. Cisco TAC made a custom firmware patch for me once.
This is something you only see from indie FOSS developers nowadays. I used to do this, and my users were always delighted. They usually became pretty loyal to the project, and the quality of bug reports they submit got exponentially better as a result.
It's a great strategy all around if you take an hour to care about another person.
