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Comment by an0malous | Hacker News Reader

My business Workspace account got suspended recently, no reason given, can’t even login to contact support. I’m a solo user so I only had one admin account and that was the one locked out. There was just one text field to submit an appeal, so I did. I never got any email confirmation or tracking number for my appeal, it’s been a week now with no contact from Google. This happened about a week after they charged my credit card for the subscription.

I’m now in the process of switching to Fastmail. Google doesn’t give a shit about anything besides for their golden goose, I would encourage everyone to move away from their services before they just screw you with no warning or recourse just because they can.

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I’m also worried that this is just the future of SaaS where everything is a Kafkaesque nightmare of automated processes no one even understands anymore, and even these incidents are lost in so much complexity the businesses either don’t care or don’t even know it’s happening.

It already is, that’s why I prefer companies I can physically visit. My hosting, email, payments for my company are now places I can reach within hours and just have a chat. In person, people are a lot less nasty and they cannot yet (…) fob me off with an AI.

To be fair, the last time I had an issue with Google I just drove up to the Googleplex, and the front desk was very helpful routing me to the right real person. Proper support otherwise was impossible.

Little sad it is like that, but at least local vendors have a chance now again. If they don't want to become 'the biggest' / make 'trillions', then you good service and 100k clients works fine too.

That's pretty much the way the work did now if you're dealing with the "right" companies. The future isn't evenly distributed.

I think the AI dystopia will save us from the SaaS dystopia and ultimately win.

Dark patterns? AI doesn't care about dark patterns. It will instantly navigate around them.

10% annual price increases for absolutely no reason? No problem! Just build a replacement. 98% of SaaS applications out there no longer have a moat. My friend just contracted out a CRM replacement for Salesforce for a small company for $65k. He built it in a few days for a few hundred dollars. Obviously it's much less feature rich, but this company never used 99% of the features in Salesforce anyway. If anything, a light weight and bespoke CRM was what they always needed and wanted anyway. SaaS just wasn't viable for bespoke.

Ads killing the experience? AI will hunt down every explicit and hidden ad and eradicate it. The entire ad model is about to die.

Is this particular problem really SaaS behavior, or is it "market share too large to care" behavior?

I ditched Google Workspace for Proton earlier this year and haven't looked back. Yes, the Proton apps don't integrate with everything and E2E encrypted data isn't as accessible as the data held in Google apps, but that's a bonus at this point.

I learned recently that there is controversy around Proton and (surprisingly to me) far-right. Previous HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48446899

Some people understand that there is naunce in the world. This is literally just the view of a single sponsor.

The way everyone gets so up-in-arms about the political views of a person three levels detached from the company is insane.

"Oh no, an individual with different views than me offhandedly mentioned Proton, the horror! I can't possibly differentiate between the views of a company and a separate individual!

Let's go grandstand about canceling our service and discouraging others from signing up because a random person thinks differently than me, and talked about the company."

I believe when the views of that person who has influence on the product, and it does not align with the services they say they desire to provide, it’s an issue.

It also can purely be choosing to not support an organization that doesn’t align with your world view. The money in our pockets is the power to change things.

If I’m reading this right, it was a failure at due diligence before sponsoring a YouTube channel. That doesn’t sound at all like what you wrote so maybe you could expand on what the controversy was?

Admitted it was a mistake, fixed it. Meanwhile google is actively platforming and funding the far right, and has no issue with it. What is the issue with Proton here exactly? This is a complete nothing burger.

I switched over to Zoho, has a lot of the same tools (mail/users/office) but UI is much more tech-y / old-school it e.g. more dense. Gets to the point.

I also use it with my own domain registered outside Zoho, so Zoho cannot actually lock me out of my email ever, only the data they host, though this is true for external domains in Google Workspace also.

Thankfully you have a domain you can switch. I feel bad for people with Gmail addresses who are really fucked when they're banned.

So much for my theory that they only did this to personal accounts. Although I guess I shouldn't be surprised, they do it to paid Google One accounts too [1]

[1]: https://support.google.com/accounts/thread/117103497/i-m-loc...

I have the same issue but just for Google Cloud thankfully. Never got a response when I filled in the text field. When I contacted support they kept asking me do go to things in the Google Cloud dashboard (that I was banned from). Then eventually the person said they'd escalate and I'd get an email but I never got anything. Maybe I'll try calling a sales number.

> Maybe I'll try calling a sales number.

It's your sign to move on, there are hundreds of other cloud providers who will actually provide meaningful human support because they need your business unlike Google.

Dispute the credit card charge and you might be able to get in touch with someone.

Or get your personal Google account permanently banned.

Exactly, if you think charging back against Google will result in a human reaching out to actually resolve the problem you are sorely mistaken.

Yea I really resonated with the messaging and mission of Migadu. Super reliable hosting. Have had it for nearly 5 years now. (of course now that I recommend it, I bet they're going to have an outage...)

I got into self hosting in 2021.

A cheap 2.5Gb how from racknerd, $20-22/year, + domain.

It's been as smooth sailing as any other email provider.

Very satisfied.

Try it

I can give racknerd a +1 by the way (compute rental in my case, not email). Prices are good, machines are machines, support exists and is helpful even for off-the-beaten-path issues, and so far they still exist despite seemingly being a small player. I'd use them again (I don't have many points of comparison though, so take this review with a grain of salt).

How do you back up? What stack are you using?

Not OP but I backup with a scheduled rclone to B2 and rsync to my local storage at home so I have the required three copies.

I use the Maildir format so each message is its own file making it atomic.

Exactly. B2 gives 10gb free so I haven't paid for backups yet.

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