LOL How very presumptuous of you. I've been using Usenet for years; my support tickets were very much technically related and necessary. In Astra's case, they were barely managing to provide me with 5% of my line's bandwidth. After much to-and-fro their main man replied to confirm the routing between their backend and my ISP had been turned off, and they were working to restore it. In Giga's case, I was asking whether they used signed SSL certificates or self-signed ones, given that my ISP is now using DPI on an anti-file-sharing drive. Self-signed certs make DPI a trivial process, whereas authenticated ones from a Trusted Authority don't. Usenet isn't complicated, I agree. But providing a good service apparently is, because it's in short supply. I don't see how asking relevant questions (for... let me think... only the second time in the last six or so years?) is driving your prices up.
Before you re-quote me as saying "the last three of four times I've sent tickets to Astra", they were on the same billing related issue whereby Astra failed to re-bill me, cut my service, and didn't reply to my tickets for four and five days at a time. Eventually I'd been without proper Usenet access for a fortnight, which is when I migrated to Giga. So yes, I'll be sticking with Giga for now and so long as they're not taking almost a week to reply to any tickets I have genuine need to send, I'll keep paying my $19.99.
You can have your soap box back now.
But I tend to agree, even though I've been a Giga customer for years, Astra can generally provide the same or better service for half the price. They're just not quite as reliable on the network front - and support is much slower than Giga's. Never the less, I'll likely be jumping over to Astra at the end of my current billing cycle as I'm seeing more of this lately.
Plenty of other (definitely EU based) NSPs to look at, but none come close to Astra or Giga in retention. XSNews and Hitnews seem decent enough, just lacking in retention. Hitnews maxes out my 50 meg cable line with a mere 2 or 3 connections - something no other provider has managed to date. They just seriously need to catch up in the retention stakes. A couple of years ago 100-200 days retention on binaries was a big deal, but now? Not so much. 