FWIW, as someone who built their career from Ogaki, Gifu, Japan, you're on the same Internet as most deep-pocketed businesses and can choose to pursue their custom at any time. Strongly consider doing so. Most technologists overrate how difficult it is.

I think most HNers currently serving mom-and-pops in a bespoke fashion should strongly consider exiting that market tomorrow. Those customers will, over time, gravitate to a Shopify or a site builder or similar because they can amortize engineering costs over 100,000 similarly situated customers and consultants can not.

I understand there are aesthetic reasons to prefer that non-tech-forward people in your local community have someone to ask questions to and help navigate options, but if you want you can throw free Set Up Your Shopify office hours every Friday as a pro bono gesture, underwritten by the piles and piles of money from the many businesses in the world that can afford professional labor.

> it makes MY recommendation of the original service seem bad

If your advice was "you get 10,000 emails per month free via $service" without qualifying "right now, but that isn't guaranteed forever, their paid tier is $x per 1000 emails and switching mail providers in the backend of your website will take approximately $Y hours at $chargable_rate", then it _was_ "bad advice" (or at the very least "incomplete advice").

I made this mistake way to many times before I learnt that lesson. (Most recently with Google Maps on websites...)