Zoho's annual revenues surpassed $1B in 2021 | Hacker News Reader

Zoho's annual revenues surpassed $1B in 2021

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202 pointsBrajeshwar100 comments

AFAIK they’re the only decent email provider that offers a free account that allows a custom domain.

I use the $1/month mail lite plan. It’s nice to have an option that doesn’t cost as much as Microsoft and Google for people that want email on a custom domain, but don’t need all the cruft (drive, apps, etc).

Yandex mail is better and it allows custom domain for free.

Yeah, but:

a) a lot of places block Russia and China wholesale against spam

b) they'e hosted in a genocidal regime without rule of law completely beholden to a dictator's whims.

Pass.

How is it better? as far as i know the other options are more feature rich

It offers IMAP and POP, which the Zoho free plan dropped some time back.

Their inbound spam filtering may also be better, given that they have more volume than Zoho to train on.

A lot of place also block it due to Yandex being full of spam accounts, even on custom domains. Not sure I'd ever trust something from them and would actively block their services.

It is not free anymore.

I moved off Zoho when they dropped support for 'basic' email features like POP and IMAP access, which forces you to use their web or mobile app.

I need unified inbox otherwise I will forget to check it.

Perhaps it's a pro only feature now or something? I just set up a client's phone to use Zoho with IMAP.

Yeah I think it moved to paid sadly. But custom domain is amazing

I thought they grandfathered free accounts that were using those.

But yeah, you have to pay for that stuff now. Personally I think it’s reasonable to have the free plan stripped down like that. It’s better than what Microsoft and Google did.

They did grandfather it in, so if you had it before, you have it now and there is no reason for someone to drop because of it - until Zoho changes it for the grandfathered accounts...

What? I still use IMAP on free tier without issues. Is this only for new accounts?

edit: Damn, I just read the sibling account. Kind of nervous now, I hope they won't drop this any time soon for grandfathered accounts.

Hello all,

As someone mentioned, our free plan doesn't support IMAP, POP and ActiveSync. But this was implemented only for newer accounts and the existing accounts which had the support earlier, continue to enjoy the features without any additional costs. So if your account was created earlier, you would have IMAP/ POP support without any issues.

Regards, ZohoMail

I'm very happy with fastmail on my custom domain. They even have tools for managing your dns records.

And serving a static site, if you're especially lazy. :)

I just use domain forwarding to have my inbound emails to my custom domain address land in my plain old Gmail account, and outbound ones to forward to my domain. All the benefits of Gmail at no cost.

Are your outbound emails signed?

Voluntarily routing all your email to the free service offered by the data mining ad company is foolish.

any tips on setting this up

last i checked (about half a year ago), they didn’t support IPv6. a tired meme, but it actually has economic impacts on my self-hoster friends. almost all ISPs block the SMTP port, and it’s way cheaper (free, even) to get an unblocked IPv6 address than an IPv4 one just because of address exhaustion. so if i used Zoho i’d kinda be forcing them to pay more if they want to be able to reach me :/

I don't get it. Your friends wouldn't be paying to connect to your Ipv4.

I think the idea is that he has friends with SMTP outbound that is only capable of ipv6. Zoho doesn't listen on any ipv6 addresses, and doesn't have any MX records that map to AAAA/ipv6, so mail from them doesn't get to Zoho.

Though I suspect Zoho is not the only medium sized email provider that doesn't support ipv6.

Why does ISP's block SMTP port for the IPv4 address but not IPv6 address?

> almost all ISPs block the SMTP port,

Is that a US thing? Or which country are you talking about? I’ve never had any port blocked in Germany.

Yes, definitely. One example:

https://www.xfinity.com/support/articles/list-of-blocked-por...

I am Barath and I am a lead customer satisfaction engineer from Zoho Mail team.

We have been working on supporting IPv6 for a while now and are in the final stages of rollout. We will start supporting IPv6 for incoming email reception by this month, This will be rolled out in a phased manner and will be supported for all the accounts by the end of 2022.

Similarly for outgoing email relay, we expect the IPv6 support to be rolled out by the end of Q1 2023.

Regards, Zoho Mail

Google workspaces in India costs 125 rupees a month. That's around $1.5. Use a VPN + an international debit card (or wise.com) to pay Google in rupees? Is there a real downside to this?

> Is there a real downside to this?

Google figuring out you are not in India and blocking your account

Ah, yep, they seem on to this:

https://support.google.com/a/answer/6175301?hl=en

For some people the downside would be using Google, and/or jumping all that hoops.

For that price I rather use Migadu, that has a 19$ Year plan.

Remember, if Google blocks you they'll likely block your personal accounts too.

Migadu is another awesome email solution. For my family and myself, we're on the "Micro" plan which works out to be 1.5 USD per month (but paid yearly). For smaller organizations and projects, we're on the "Mini" plan which is 9 USD per month.

Super cheap, very reliable and easy to setup. Never had any issues in the years I've been using it. I'm not associated with them, just a happy user that wishes them all the best.

https://www.migadu.com/pricing/

They also have a page about their pros/cons: https://www.migadu.com/procon/

If nothing else, it's one of the more honest pieces of company writing out there, although some of the things could be dealbreakers for some people. I suggest that you check it out, it's written in a pretty straightforward and easy to understand language and lays everything bare.

their support is great too. same guy every time for me, and they remember you. just dont use them for business email, though they will accommodate it briefly if you're setting up a baby saas. they'll let you know theyre not a volume sender solution

Charged per (Migadu) account, too - not per user. Seems like you can have basically unlimited users/domains per account, which is nice.

Not being able to spawn random addresses (payments@, contact@) without paying really turns me off a lot of other providers.

I'm on migadu, but the problem remains the same: I can't find a decent email client.

Either the client is bundled with email, but then the email doesn't support multidomain and multi user (or have to pay for each, which is bad), or it's just not shared between web and android.

If I could solve this, I would be able to uninatall gmail, which right now I use uniquely as an email client.

Used to be a paid customer, nowadays using its free email with custom domain, for the last 8 years. Thanks Zoho email!

I work at inbox.eu.

You can use it for free if you are ok with sending max 3 emails per day. You need to verify mobile phone or verify account via Telegram for free acounts. Also 9.99 EUR per year for premium account is one of the lowest prices available in the market from professional email providers :)

> or verify account via Telegram for free acounts

This is great! I'm signing up right now!

Do you have peering? Where are you hosted?

I can asks admins about peering. I have no idea as am am developer :)

We are hosted in Latvia (DEAC data centers) and we manage our servers on our own

Yes please! I'd love to know.

Also, how many people does your team have? :)

Yandex offers a custom domain too

FWIW They do way more than email … it has been fascinaa sad to g to watch them grow over many years. Their initial devs were school dropouts.

Fascinating … typo

Until recently I liked ZOHO. For the charity that I worked for, we built our website around ZOHO. They made us buy 7 licenses at the regular price, and that was a pretty tough arrangement for us. We only had one actual user. The rest were because a bunch of volunteers using one particular product. Zoho would not accept that fact. So we are a bigger part of that $1B than we like.

Bet the alternatives of what you're asking are much more expensive.

If the volunteers are using one particular Zoho product then in what sense are they not actual users?

Sometimes these low-code platforms only have one idea of a user. So, maybe you make a app to accept applications for employment. It's reasonable, then, to pay licenses for your developer and your HR staff. But, if you want the candidates to be able to check status of their application, often the licensing is such that you would have to pay for a seat per applicant.

if the charity is a non-profit, you should look into https://techsoup.org

they have relationships with many software providers to get discounted non-profit pricing.

MSFT offers Office 365 @ $3/mo/user for their nonprofit tier

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/nonprofit/plan...

It sounds like you are using Zoho One. You get 40 apps for that price of $37/month paid annually. But the situation is that to get that great price, and it is fantastic, you have to put Zoho One on every computer. It's stated right in the purchase price. "Must purchase license for ALL employees*" "*Your business will have to commit to purchase Zoho One licenses for ALL employees on payroll."

If the volunteers are true volunteers and not on payroll, you should be able to have only one copy.

I see that they do have the Flexible-User Pricing for $90/month paid annually.

Shout out to Sridhar Vembu, founder of Zoho

http://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=sridharvembu

There are a few more co-founders:

I want to provide details of our early history because they are not well-known. There were two bootstrapped entities, one in the US and one in India back in 1995. In the suburb of East Tambaram in Chennai, India, my brothers Kumar Vembu (now founder and CEO of GoFrugal and also active in Zoho Corp) and Sekar Vembu (now founder and CEO of Vembu Technologies) and Shailesh Kumar (who heads our Engineering and Zoho Labs today) started a bootstrapped operation at home. Kumar returned from the US after a very brief 1-year stint, and found some contract software development work in the field of telecom software and that was how he paid the bills.

In the US, our co-founder Tony Thomas, who I talk to almost daily to seek his wisdom, my personal daily Buddha, started a bedroom operation in New Jersey in 1995, and he brought in our co-founder Sreenivas Kanumuru (CEO of vTiger). Tony’s elder brother Joy Thomas, who recently passed away (RIP, Joy) and one of the all-time great students from IIT Chennai, helped Tony with a personal loan. Tony had started to work on a library for the SNMP API protocol in Java.

As of late 1995, I was not in the picture, other than advising my brothers. A common friend from IIT introduced me to Tony (who was 3 years ahead of me in IIT and I did not know him during my student days). I then introduced Tony to my brothers in India. They started working together in mid to late 1996.

- Sridhar Vembu, 25 years of Zoho (2021), https://archive.is/bpfUC

One more clear example that you don't need to be in SF to build a venture-scale SaaS

Dude bootstrapped the company.

Last I read, Zoho was working on solving some Japanese village's issue. Forgot exactly what it was about. Interesting guy and company who are solving problems. Kudos to them.

It's the only example I know. do you know any other example?

What’s “venture scale” mean? There are a lot of billion dollar SAAS outside of SV.

I moved to Zoho mail when Gmail threatened to kick us all off or pay money.

Honestly, I couldn't be happier. The spam filtering works as well or better, the email app is intuitive, and I no longer have to keep switching Google accounts. Previously it seemed every Google property just picked an account at random.

I almost moved to Zoho for the same reason but then didn’t when big G changed their minds. Probably just delaying the inevitable but didn’t want to deal with the hassle of moving my whole family if I didn’t have to.

I did try out Zoho for months on one of my domains and was quite impressed. Zoho may be my go-to spot for future business services.

I've been using Zoho's email for a few years now (only because they used to provide free custom domain email - brilliant growth tactic!). The service itself works perfectly and integrates well with Apple Mail (albeit they changed the server configurations over the years two times if I recall correctly). Though their web client leaves some to be desired, it made very good progress and I believe it would be comparable to Gmail in the foreseeable future. As for their other services, I have not tried them but I would guess that copying Google Workspace is the general theme of development. Bigger picture I think it's great Google Workspace and Office 365 will have real competition, especially on the pricing front, that is outside the US (which means it is influenced by different interests and less likely to join the monopoly) and it will benefit everyone involved.

I have not had good integration experiences with Apple Mail. Their service doesn't support mail push last time I checked, so you end up waiting 15 minutes or so for messages whenever Apple Mail decides to poll IMAP

If you mean using Zoho from Apple Mail app, you need to use active sync server at Zoho. THen you get push.

Thank you, this is what I was looking for!

> I believe it would be comparable to Gmail in the foreseeable future

Story of every email provider ever: Soon to look like Gmail. At one point you have to admit that Gmail is the best (meanwhile designers at Gmail are trying to remove features from the UI).

Looking like Gmail doesn’t even guarantee success: Marissa Mayer made an exact copy of Gmail in Yahoo Mail in 2014. It didn’t take off.

Zoho is amazing. They deserve it.

Happily using Zoho for 2-3 years now. Moved away from Google because... well you can't trust them with anything.

What about elections? We can trust Google with those, right?

Haha, and you can trust the Indian government? No offense, but India any cop can walk into Zoho's offices and ask for whatever they want. It doesn't have to go through any agency. Given the corruption of that country, you're absolutely dreaming if you think your data is safer.

Bullshit. India is not an autocratic country. Indian people’s rights are well protected by rule of law.

The same law that gives any officer in charge of a police station the authority to demand any data deemed desirable for the purposes of any investigation, inquiry, trial or other proceeding?

Are you serious? I wish there were an an emoji for a hollow, scornful laugh.

India is not an autocratic country only as long as the autocrats at any level don't deem you a threat. Otherwise you are screwed. When the law makers and law enforcers form a tight bond, what is the meaning of "protected" and "rule of law"?

Try getting the law involved when you don't want to pay a bribe.

Try peacefully protesting for people's rights. https://www.wired.com/story/modified-elephant-planted-eviden... There is v little room for dissent under this govt.

Try appealing to the law by getting the local MLA/MP's goons off your land.

I could go on ....

It's the same in western countries

No, not really. Of course shit happens everywhere, but the scale is VASTLY different.

In Western countries:

  1. They use the law to do the same thing
  2. The media doesn't report on it

I don't think India is a lawless jungle as you portray it.

Indian authorities have tried to ban cryptocurrencies but have repeatedly been blocked by the courts. Whatever you think about crypto this indicates a healthy division of power and check against government overreach.

You might want to read Section 91 of the CrPC: https://indiankanoon.org/doc/788840/

You can choose to have your data in GDPR-compliant EU-based datacenter

I'm not worried about the US or Indian government.

I am worried about Google blocking my account and me not being able to contact anyone to get access to it ever again.

This right here. This is why I left Google.

Profit margins are impressive too: https://inc42.com/buzz/zoho-clocks-inr-5229-cr-in-sales-prof...

These guys seem to do it all and for a fraction of the price. They’re playing a completely different game than the popular Enterprise SaaS players. Surprised they don’t get more press. Probably because they don’t have investors.

ZOHO Assist works well too. It might be worth considering if you are looking to switch from TeamViewer or another competitor.

I switched to Zoho when Gmail threatened to kill our legacy Gsuite account I was using for my family. So far I'm pretty happy although not everything is perfect.

I wrote up my experience here: https://jedfonner.com/2022/07/30/switching-to-zoho

TL;DR:

- pricing is pretty good. I use the Mail Lite plan for my kids which provided 5GB and upgraded myself to the 10GB plan, all for just a few bucks a month.

- importing mailboxes went very smoothly

- solid mobile and desktop apps, even for Linux (although it uses Electron which I know triggers some people)

- calendaring is frustrating but I don't think that's really Zoho's fault.

- a few small bugs but amazingly a human will reply to you if you file a bug report and eventually it will get fixed!

I feel better knowing that they pay attention to their customers. I'm happy to pay for good service.

There’s a mail + calendar + chat + file storage desktop app in Beta - https://www.zoho.com/trident/

Also they spinned off another brand for Families - https://www.zillum.com

> Sridhar Vembu of Zoho said that no other company has built a billion dollar product company in India.

India has no other billion dollar product companies? Doesn’t Tata sell cars?

I think he means software product company. Anyhow, regardless of that his statement is inaccurate because Zoho IS NOT an Indian company. Majority of its employees are in India (and the founder is Indian) but that's true for a lot of other international companies as well, that doesn't make them Indian.

It has its HQ in India, the founder is indian as you state as well (the other founder is american), the market is global, and the main jurisdiction is possibly american (?)

These things get blurry with global markets and jurisdictions, but I would definitely call them an indian company.

What makes them more Indian is the lack of VC which usually forces Indian companies to HQ/incorporate in Singapore or USA.

It would be interesting to see which jurisdiction they pay highest taxes in though. It’s possible to find out for India, UK and EU, maybe I will.

As you say the majority of staff are in India, the founder is Indian but also crucially the major stakeholder[1] is also Indian and lives in India.

I'm not sure how they could be anything else but Indian.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radha_Vembu

I stand corrected, I did some digging and found out that Zoho has recently reorganised itself and is now an Indian company.

He is a bit cuckoo in terms of making statements. Follow him on twitter.

He means a tech product company.

Most other billion dollar Indian tech companies are in the IT outsourcing business.

Why about the likes of Paytm or Flipkart?

Different industries - PayTM is mainly into finance while Flipkart (now owned by Walmart) is into online retail. (Though both also dabble in each others field). Just because they use tech, doesn't make them a software company.

Software products. IIT -> Princton PhD in Electrical engineering -> Qualcomm -> Services Company in that space -> CRM product. And then moves his dev center to the lowest income rural village he can find.. "In 2004, he set up Zoho Schools to provide vocational software development education to rural students as an alternative to formal university education. A statement from the company states that 15 to 20 percent of its engineers have no college degree, but have received vocational education from Zoho Schools".

Legend.

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33527339

I am not quite sure you want your data in there.

https://entrackr.com/2022/11/exclusive-indian-isps-we-alread...

Zoho is a global company. For instance, their EU customers data stays in the EU: https://www.zoho.com/blog/general/zoho-data-centers-in-europ... (2016)

I just wished their spam handling was better. Not a day goes by without 10+ spam on my inbox.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com