Buhata goes into production in a few days. Windows, Android and the browser at launch, all from one build, with Apple coming shortly after.
Before that happens I want to get something out of the way, because you'll run into it the first time you need us.
There's no phone number.
I sat on that one for a while. Phone support means people on a rota, or an agency somewhere doing it on my behalf, and a bill arriving every month whether anybody called or not. That money has to come from somewhere and it always comes from you. Either the subscription climbs, or there's a cheap plan that technically exists and quietly can't reach a human.
I've been on the wrong end of that more than once. Forty minutes of hold music, then a very polite person asking me to restart the app.
So what did I build
Deciding against phone support took an afternoon. Making support work anyway took considerably longer, and that's the part worth writing about.
Everything runs through a thing I built for us called Buhata Console Manager.
Support tickets, support email, info email, suggestions, bug reports. Each one gets its own queue and its own number sitting beside it. When a number moves I already know what kind of thing landed before I open it. Sounds small. It's the difference between working a queue and digging through an inbox at eleven at night.
On your side it shows up as the Help Center, in the corner of every page.
It opens with the three things most people came for. If yours isn't one of them, you sign in and open a ticket in that same panel. Use a code sent to your email, or your Microsoft, Apple or Google account, whichever one you already have open. You don't create an account for it. I also didn't want to hand anybody off to a support site on some other domain that makes you register before it'll hear you out.
The bug report I deserved
Somebody sent in a bug report, and part of it was about our own wording. It read like they'd hear back from us. They didn't hear back. They were right to be annoyed, and it was my copy that did it.
So, plainly.
Support tickets get an email reply. That's what a ticket is for.
Bug reports and suggestions work differently. I read all of them. Anything I can reproduce gets fixed, and the suggestions that keep showing up get built. What I don't do is write back to each one individually, because doing that properly would put me straight back where the phone number was.
The old wording let you assume an answer was coming. Nothing irritates me more than a company implying it'll get back to me and then going quiet, so I'd rather tell you how it works up front. The form now says which kind of message you're sending and what happens to it. If you want a reply, it points you at the one that gets you a reply.
One more thing
I'm not going to pretend five queues and a row of counters is thrilling engineering.
But a month ago, if you'd asked me what happens to a message after you send it, I'd have had to guess. Now I can tell you exactly. For something I'm about to hand to strangers, that turned out to matter more than it sounds like it should.
Buhata launches in days. We're on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok and X if you want to watch it happen. Links are at the bottom of this page.