- With a support contract, there are SLAs to respond to incidents / bugs within a timely manner, and

- You have a clear escalation path to talk to engineers, rather than customer service, and

- While you can’t dictate what features / bugs will get fixed, you do have some weight for prioritization.

If you have no support contract, then you may not be able to talk to engineers at all, your bug reports may get completely ignored (not even looked at), etc.

> it doesn't much matter if you got that reply in a timely manner

Compare "I can't do that" with "They wouldn't do that".