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Comment by m_fayer | Hacker News Reader

I had Zoho set up on the lowest tier for a side-hustle project years ago. It did it's job smoothly and without much intrusion. Then the project ended and I forgot about the Zoho account, changed phone numbers, lost the 2fa keys - all of it. Totally my fault. Their support quickly and competently handheld me through the shutdown process. I can't imagine the nightmare Google would've forced me through to shut down a pointless 3$/month charge had I made the same mistake with them.

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Zoho support is neat when you compare against any other big tech.

They are kind of slow at developing features, for instance you can't set up new tags/folders for email in the phone app, only on desktop, and this has been like that since beginning of times.

Thats great. The "I want to do everything on my phone" folk need to be told NO at some point. A somewhat cluttered but usable desktop interface cramped fully onto a tiny phone screen will have to much nested menu options to be able to discover things. I went into this dead end more often than I should have, wasted a lot of time until I finally started wondering what the hell I was thinking. The funniest was a long side menu next to a pdf. One could add all kinds of information and pick formatting and styling. On a phone you couldn't even see the pdf. Endless sub menus. Truly hilarious. I also one time build an advanced search interface with so many options it was.. uhh... completely unusable.

But these are exactly in Africa, phone only.

Email without tags or folders works fine on a phone. I barely use it on desktop. You can always make multiple mail addresses.

"Don't you guys have laptops". Maybe it's about your customers and the devices they use!

If you care more about land-grabbing users to aggregate demand (https://stratechery.com/aggregation-theory/) then you can develop what users wants, get them onboard, and then start squeezing profits out of that. That is what Google, Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Apple, Facebook et al did. Here we are with ads on freemium products, and now the data we generate are more valuable to feed to train AIs.

If you're trying to sustainably develop features to support users, even if the pace of the feature development is very slow, I think that is what we are seeing with Zoho.

Just don't bother making things if you cant get it to work properly.

There are more smartphones in use than people on the planet so it stands to reason that for many, the smartphone IS their interface to the world the way the desktop was (and maybe still is) for many of us. Seems more like an opportunity to implement a different design paradigm than something to be dismissed outright.

I made a similar mistake with AWS where I have $0.50 monthly charge. I called and they want me to go through a lengthy processes including getting documents notarized to handle it. So instead, I just canceled the card and am patiently waiting for them to shut down the account from failed charges. It’s been about a year now though and it’s still going.

Oh man, be very careful with that. I don't know about AWS specifically, but many of those big tech companies have powerful ways to get you, and they often use them. You may be silently blacklisting yourself from being an AWS customer in the future. As they are fond of saying, cancelling the card is not cancelling the service. You still owe the money!

These fears are why I never use AWS, GCP, Azure, etc and prefer something simple like DigitalOcean where I just add money to my funds via PayPal. If I exceed the limit, they shut down my account. Highly preferable than accidentally getting banned from say Google and losing my gmail where I access incredibly important things like healthcare, finances, utilities, etc.

Same, most of the time, although I don't use Digital Ocean much after a client of mine issued a charge back having forgotten what "Digital Ocean" was (even though I explained it several times). before talking to me, they locked my admin panel so I was completely unable to fix a production issue. Then when I discovered what had happened they took several business days to "unlock" my admin panel. I suffered a pretty big reputation hit with my clients and was put in a position I NEVER want to be in again: "sorry normally it would take me 5 minutes to get the site back up, but it's gonna be <unknown> number of days until DO decides to unlock my account, long after I gave an updated credit card and paid the balance. I use Linode now, and hopefully Akamai won't mess that up.

Ah that's a shame, I've never had much issues luckily and heard good things about Linode. I believe they are cheaper than DO now too.

I don’t know for AWS but I did that once as a teenager with another cloud provider and they sent a debt collector to my family home to collect a few euros. The debt collector had a nice fee.

Let me guess, it had two 1s in its name...

Yes.

Related: AWS has an unwritten policy of giving customers one get out of jail free card when they inevitably fuck up. I’ve called upon this once, completely my fault, at work. AWS refunded me over $2,000 USD (at a company small enough for that to be a big number).

I used ManageEngine MDM before, which belongs to Zoho. The support is excellent, even though I was only using the free tier, they did everything to assist me. Open the support chat, one minute later you are chatting with a human (!), not some robot that you have to trick to eventually speak to someone.

I also used Zoho for mail, it was pretty nice and they had quite robust support once I got an issue. I left them only because I already pay for iCloud+ and comes with custom domain support, so I realized I didn't need to pay for another service.

The Web UI of the mail and the mobile app was also quite good.

Agreed. I setup zoho voice, ported from Google business voice, and had an issue where SMS wasn't going through even though it said it was. Zoho's issue or some porting issue. But I quickly chatted with a human, they resolved it and let me know when it was fixed. I have no idea how to even start a conversation with a Google rep from any of their interface. Zoho had it easy to find.

I've also had great customer service experience with Zoho. In both cases it was my fault but they helped me anyway.

I was very pleased with their product. They are one of the few companies who are actively adding settings and options to their products, and they are very thorough with their designs! You can do almost anything you want to do between the settings and the API they offer.

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