It's cheap and it works well. Also integrates into everything related you'd need.
Speaking for myself, running a bakery, I chose MS 365/Teams with regret but accepting that there's nothing else out there with the same value proposition except maybe Google workspace.
They have regional pricing so we get everything for the equivalent of $3.50 per user. Basically no other apps offer regional price - Slack alone would cost about $8 a user.
This includes chat, calls, messaging, 1tb of onedrive space per user, calendar, planner, emails, office, plus loads more.
Sure, it's janky but it basically works. The only thing I've found with a close value proposition (still slightly more expensive even if I limit to just a few gb of space per user) is self-hosted Nextcloud, which is about the same level of janky and requires a tech person or team to set up.
No reason to not just host email with any domain provider and manage the rest with a small NAS in the office.
Not only cheaper and taking away the update obligations of Microsoft. Which I am sure kills more productivity than managing a Synology server.
Also, much as I wish otherwise, very little happens via email in this business. It's all chat apps now.
The important part is cross platform real time communications, calendar, and office. Some kind of kanban board is a nice bonus.
Synology is also setup and keep running for years usually.
It's just an example tho. I just don't see any need for a Microsoft cloud solution for a small company (or anyone really)
Sounds like even more of a single point of failure, just on your domain provider (who's much more likely to go out of business) than Microsoft. And one with no chat, or phones, or conference calling, or shared calendars, or endpoint management, or SSO, etc, etc.
Just sticking all your data on a cheap NAS in the office works for a few people, although it becomes PITA to do granular permissions when you don't have any proper central authentication. But then it's also a massive single point of failure, so you need to implement a backup solution, and then a way to share files outside of the organisation, and then a VPN so that people can work remotely, and then some monitoring so that you know when a disk fails....and that's getting way beyond what a non-technical person can manage.
It's fine if you're just using it for your hobby. But building your business on top of something like is very likely to come back and bite you in the arse.
And I am sure there are even better options than a household Synology.
But putting everything in a cloud and fully depending on a single provider that for the majority of people is in a foreign (and politically dangerous) country is definitely not the obviously better option.
And plenty of small businesses and hobbyists do that, and then after they "setup and forget" it they get compromised or lose their data a few years down the line.
Why would using a NAS (or small server) mean ignoring any basic logic (and business requirements) and not having off-site backups?
People absolutely should be setting up offsite backups. And more importantly, testing them so that they can prove that they work. But if they have no technical team then neither of those things are going to happen.
I would not imagine storage to be a major cost with something like Nextcloud. They major cost is going to be the tech person to set it up, and you do not need that many hours to do it. Mostly an initially one off cost will be high, and big upgrades might be a lot of work, but maintenance should not be
It's currently at around the break even point compared to MS Teams. I think maybe $5 a month more expensive all in for the VPS, storage, and backup.
It would be cheaper if I could run on Arm but unfortunately Hetzner doesn't have that in their Asia region yet.
Google Sheets is IMO also much nicer than Excel and for small business you don't really need to deal with Excel lock in.
That being said, the price you got seems unreal.
Teams is much better suited for a company with 1000 staff and a tech department. Admin is massively overcomplicated. Oh well, hindsight is 20/20 I guess.
> That being said, the price you got seems unreal.
We're in Vietnam, and like I said, regional pricing. It is a good deal, but doesn't look quite as unreal from over here. Really wish more companies would do regional pricing, $8 a month for slack, $10 for notion and so on is basically a no go for a small business here.