How to Set Up Support Periods
Support periods are built into Superhive to encourage long term sustainability in your work with ongoing income opportunities to fuel your maintenance, feature development and customer support as your product grows.
Choose to include support periods in your product edit page.
You can include support periods on a per product and per variant basis. This is achieved with a simple check box on your product edit page. The box is unchecked by default. Checking this box will automatically apply support periods to your product and any associated variants.
Choosing the percentage cost of support periods
When you check this box, it will reveal a dropdown for you to choose the cost of additional support periods for customers who choose to expand support and access to updates in the future. This cost applies to your product as a whole including any associated variants.
IMPORTANT these percentages are the percentages of the current price of the product when the customer purchases their additional support period. For example, choosing 100% means that the customer will pay full price for an additional support period.
When considering the percent of cost for your support periods, consider the amount of work that you will be investing in your product going forward. If you have a complex project which could require a full rebuild or has large additional features and tools planned in your twelve month road map you should choose a higher rate like 75%. If you are planning mainly to provide maintenance and stellar customer support, you should consider the lower percentage cost, 25%.
Addressing variants
When you include support periods for your product, this automatically opts in all variants of that product to support periods. If you choose not to include support periods on a particular variant (for instance to manage legacy customers separately), you can uncheck the box on that variant in the expanded menu for the variant.
Backfilling customer support periods
This is a relevant and necessary step when adding support periods to an existing product. If you are adding support periods to a new product when you are first building that product on Superhive, this step does not apply and can be skipped.
Customers on Superhive exist in two cohorts: before support periods and after support periods. Any customers of your product who purchased the product prior to support periods being introduced are automatically categorized as legacy customers and are not subject to support periods for your product. If you add support periods to a product after support periods are introduced on Superhive, you have customers in a limbo state associated with this product. They will see a message on the product that their support period status is being updated until you backfill their purchase information.
Backfilling customer purchase information will assign their purchase date in accordance with support period and update the display of the support period for the customer providing guaranteed support and update access for twelve months after their original purchase date of the product.
Support periods were introduced to Superhive on June 22, 2026. If you are choosing to include support periods on an existing product, you should consider the customer impact for these purchases between June 22 and the date you choose to include support periods. If there is a long term and many new customers within this time you could be initiating a support period for past customer which is very short or even already expired. We urge you to strongly consider the growth of your product as part of the initiation of a support period. If you have invested significant effort in your product, it could be time to introduce support periods and customers will be encouraged to invest in them.
Managing new support periods in this instance by introducing a new variant of the product (for example a PRO version) which includes support periods while the basic version does not could be an option to help segment those customers who purchased since June 22 and prior to you initiating support periods on the product. In this circumstance, your product should have undergone significant improvements to justify the new variant of the product and greatly differentiate the PRO from the Basic variant.
If you are creating a variant on a product which has past sales and no current existing variant, you will need to migrate your past customers.
If you do greatly invest time and effort in greatly improving a product, that is a great opportunity to explore support periods to continue that high quality production and development far into the future.