Fired a customer today. They were paying us $4K/month. Here's why it was worth it.

They were our 12th largest customer. $48K ARR. Not trivial revenue.

But they were consuming 40% of our support team's time. Every ticket was urgent. Every interaction was hostile. Every feature request was a demand. They'd threatened to churn monthly for two years while never actually leaving.

The team was burned out on them. Support morale suffered. Other customers got slower responses because we were triaging around this one account.

Calculated the fully-loaded cost of supporting them: support time, engineering escalations, account management stresskes. It exceeded what they paid by about 60%.

Sent them a polite email explaining we couldn't meet their service expectations and offering to help them transition to an alternative provider. They were shocked. Angry. Threatened legal action. Then quietly moved to a competitor.

Team morale improved within a week. Support metrics improved across the board. The capacity we freed up let us serve growing accounts better.

Not every customer is worth keeping. The math isn't just their revenue, it's their total cost to serve. Some customers are unprofitable even at premium prices.