Zoho Catalyst – Serverless Platform Launched

Looks promising.

The file storage is extremely cheap. I'm getting prices in my current locale, but it seems like they charge about $0.0001 per GB of storage. B2 in comparison costs $0.005 per GB. They don't charge for bandwidth but for download operations. They seem to be betting that most people will store small files.

They call the DB "relational" but I can't seem to find anything in the docs about relations, joins, cascade delete, etc.

Any performance metrics regarding cold-starts of the underlying architectures (dev/prod)? I hope Zoho don't think they can mimic the big boys suite of offerings without wowing with any one thing.

If you are wondering what Free Light Use in the dev environment means here don't hold your breath, it's underwhelming. The docs say a total of 500k API calls MAXIMUM are allowed per app in the dev env, phased out quicker at their discretion if they detect prod-like usage. For contrast, Cloudflare workers is more generous and upfront 100,000 executions every day, 1,000 per min limit.

It's the same feeling with their Zoho paid email service that is capped at this vague "normal" useage, it's anyone's guess what that is, they don't reveal the numbers before squeezing you up to the next pay level. And on that topic $1.41 per 1000 serverless email sends is expensive when your typical domain registrar allows hundreds per hour as standard freebie.

Did 3 Zoho suite implementations over a few years.

Swore off using any of their products because the rough edges hurt badly on a daily basis.

In Lojban, "zoho" is an alternate spelling of https://vlasisku.lojban.org/zo'o which means "as a joke" or "in a joking manner".