Qt Premium Support: Learning and Experiences

The Qt Company Support Team works hand-in-hand with Qt R&D developers, and we are 100% committed to ensuring your success. It’s now been a bit over half a year since we launched the new Premium Support service. We felt that now would be a good time to recapture its essence and the experiences of our teams and customers. We will be sharing lots of troubleshooting tips and best practices on March 6th, in our Qt Support - Tips and Tricks webinar - make sure to join and tell us about your project! In the meantime, here's a brief recap of what we've been working on.

Qt Support Services

Standard Support is included with all new commercial Qt licenses (apart from start-up licenses). This guarantees that we respond to your request within 48 business hours and prioritize your reported Qt errors. However, many of our customers require more personal and quicker support service. This is where Premium Support comes in. It offers a dedicated support representative close to your time zone who will respond to you within 10 business hours on average. This means that if we get your request in the morning you can see our response before you leave work.

When we try to reproduce any issues you may have, we can also use your complete applications instead of minimal test versions to analyze issues and fix bugs. Premium Support reported Qt bugs also get high priority and will get handled quickly.

You can find the SLA terms on our webpage.

Experiences from Premium Support

We've resolved oodles of bug fix requests for our Premium Support customers. With Premium Support it doesn't really matter whether the issue lies in your code or in the Qt libraries. We will investigate and find the solution no matter what. Typically bugs can be difficult to resolve in Standard Support since a minimal test application is required and some of the issues are really hard to reproduce with anything else than customer application. Being able to use customer application really speeds up resolving bugs!

We have also been providing a lot of guidance on best practices on particular use cases for our customers. This includes ideal usage of Qt APIs and what can be done within the customer application, algorithm guidance, architecture design and optimizing performance.

Another type of project we are often involved in is the migration from obsolete Qt version to a newer Qt5 version. Although almost everything works out-of-the-box when upgrading Qt, there are cases that require changes to the code. If you have a large codebase, it's tedious to check whether some functionality has changed in a newer Qt version. Other times an upgrade comes with new features that make it easier to implement certain user application functionalities. This is where we can help you a lot since we know all the details of Qt and changes between versions.

Even though we can't guarantee that all reported bugs will get fixed in a specific way, we have been able to find a usable workaround. That way you will never be stuck with your issues for long.

The Feedback from our Customers

Our customers have been genuinely happy with our service and gave us lots of great feedback on how we resolved their issues and clarified any doubts they might have had on certain topics.

We chose Qt Commercial because, firstly – we needed support. Time to market was critical for us, and to be able to ensure that we have timely responses to any important technical questions that came up was very important to maintain the pace of development. ’

- James Patterson, Technical Director, Co-Founder, Eykona Technologies

“We purchased an enterprise contract with The Qt Company because Qt gives us the expressiveness and the speed of a native UI framework with a very low maintenance cost and a nice support network behind us. We believe Qt will further our mission of providing the best user experience for our customers.’’

- Adam Christian, Senior Software Engineer, Tableau

“The support for free is amazing - the support for commercial is outstanding. If you want to feel that, you, the humble developer matters - use these guys. You are not only heard - if you lift your game with logging problems (give them a definite example of what is wrong, steps to reproduce, what you expect) - they 99% are fixed next release. New features, slight changes too. These guys are good. I'm a bit of a newcomer, only a year and a half using Qt but I'm a big fan.’’

- Reddit fan /u/6thComm

If you want to get or find out more about Premium Support, don’t hesitate to contact your account representative, or simply drop us a line.