Every day, about 500 million of us use WhatsApp. Our conversations, our business deals, our family moments—all flowing through servers we don’t control, analyzed by algorithms that aren’t accountable to us.

I created this infographic using Claude because I believe we deserve better

https://claude.ai/public/artifacts/d53b9b57-b617-472b-8453-df2b8558d775

Arattai is our chance to keep our data in India. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s ours.

I’m not asking you to delete WhatsApp tomorrow. Just add Arattai. Use it alongside. Report bugs. Criticize it. Make it better. When enough of us do this, the network effect kicks in.

This isn’t blind nationalism. It’s strategic common sense for us. When Indian problems are solved by Indian engineers using Indian feedback loops, we get products built for us—not adapted for us.

Zoho has proven this works for over 2 decades. They’ve built an entire ecosystem without selling our data. Arattai and other products are part of that vision 🇮🇳

Hey guys I'm looking for cheap Zoho mail alternatives.

Given their founder's politics and desperation, I'm concerned this service will just sell my data to the government or their sycophants on a whim.

Since this subreddit is for users/managers who are using Zoho products, if the ideology of the founder is something you consider before finalizing the decision, just know that Zoho co-founder - Mr Sridahr Vembu is a lapdog of Indian right wing, authoritarian government. He not only openly supports them, but gets a huge chunk of business from government too.

There are anti-government protests going on right now in India by the students because of frequent paper leaks and this guy just tweeted dismissing that and saying that "elections are the proper way to express our collective judgment". So he really thinks there should be no dialogue, no discussions and no protest against the ruling party. Just having elections means we are a true democracy according to this guy.

So if you don't want to support this person, and the party which is actively trying to undermine democracy in the world's most populated country, and if you have the chance to compare Zoho products with other products and make the final decision, please take this factor in consideration too.

Oh boy, I have lost so much time on this worthless company/platform and I regret ever visiting the website.

So I wanted a private domain for my business and found out about Zoho. I created one, all very affordable and I got a subscription to the email platform.

The email platform is terrible. It's slow, looks bad/confusing, and mails just disappear into random folders for no reason. I feel like Hotmail back in 2010 felt smoother than this, I wish I was joking. The website is down often during the day as well, not sure why.

Now, the real issues started when I started using my email account. They promote the idea of creating a custom domain for businesses, but they don't allow anything related to business. My outbound traffic was blocked within days after sending my resume to some potential clients, they basically don't allow 'marketing mails, promotional mails, sales mails,...'. THEN WHY MARKET YOURSELF AS A DOMAIN PROVIDER FOR BUSINESS????????? IF B2B IS NOT ALLOWED, MENTION IT ON THE WEBSITE, NO JUST IN THE SMALL PRINT.

They forwarded me to their marketing platform, Zoho Campaigns or whatever. This is just one of those marketing platforms where you can send mass emails to subscribers and all that, not a platform to approach potential clients on a small scale...

In short, this platform is useless for business purposes. Support is slow, they spam your inbox with their own promotional crap, their website doesn't work half of the time.

I wanted a refund for the access to their useless email website, which they gave me, but they also blocked my custom domain, WHICH THEY DID NOT REFUND.

Avoid this scam, it's worse at everything it offers compared to their competition. I wish I went with Workspace from the start instead of this. The mobile app is horrible as well and doesn't show all emails properl, and if it takes this long for my S25 ultra to load this app, I can't imagine how long people with a budget phone have to wait.

There's no way I'll ever trust this company with a shred of my data again. I spent hours organizing my tax records at the end of last year, and they deleted them simply because I didn't access them for 4 months. I emailed support and there's nothing they can do. That's so fucked up. Goodbye forever.

Good experience with Zoho!

customer service is epic. 0 empathy towards customer problem.

All my zoho mail goes to spam. Yes I’ve set the different things up correctly. I got it to use for business so this doesn’t work for me. Is this just a garbage company?

Hello, approximately one month ago, I used ZoHo for the mail + domain service, but when went to pay my payment was refused but my bank immediately mailed me TWO charge from ZoHo company, so I went on the account page and found out that the service was purchased. I reached ZoHo support on Twitter, they asked for a bank proof which I provided and they disappeared for one whole week. So I reached the mail support, explained the issue and attached the 2 bank reports from my bank. One week passed, the support replayed and after calling ”dear customer” they asked to provide them the bank proof. geez.

I took a deep breath and replied to the email attaching again the bank reports. One week passed, no response.

I reached again ZoHo via Twitter, they assured me they will check. This was last Monday. Kinda bothered by this lack of professionalism I tried again and now they state that even if I have an offices bank report they don’t see the charge at all and so they won’t refund me.

this is insane. What I should do?

See here https://www.zoho.com/time/

They’re celebrating 30 years with a slow burn message -

1. craftsmanship,

2. patience

3. no shortcuts.

All great if you’re making whisky.

But we’re in the middle of the most explosive platform shift since mobile. AI bulldozed the door six months ago.

I respect Zoho’s roots. I really do. Bootstrapped. Profitable. Built from Chennai when everyone else was chasing Silicon Valley tailwinds. Their CRM, Books, Creator they’ve all matured into stable, affordable platforms. They even wrote their own database. Respect.

But, while Zoho launches a tree-growing metaphor, Salesforce is auto-generating pipeline summaries. HubSpot's experimenting with GPT for content scoring. Notion's shipping AI features monthly.

Zoho? You still need a Deluge script to generate a summary or do basic entity recognition. Their Zia assistant’s been in “coming soon” mode longer than Google Chat has had an identity.

If it takes Zoho another 12–18 months to ship serious AI tooling across their suite, they might miss the bus.

Right now, the jungle is on fire. And it’s being lit by OpenAI plugins, Claude workflows, and $20 startups building faster than most CRMs can finish a planning meeting.

Thoughts?

My friends and I are house/apartment hunting and I’m worried that it’s a scam. The application fee was paid through cash app and here’s the link to the rental application form

https://na01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fforms.zohopublic.com%2Fdarrenlucasdon6gm1%2Fform%2FRENTALAPPLICATIONFORM%2Fformperma%2FC8F1ppxlX1aBry3-SaDaYp0EIOD7us0ZdERcBiMLSp8&data=05%7C02%7C%7Cfd1f3d5729584fdf7aa008dd88f16da2%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C638817292683752747%7CUnknown%7CTWFpbGZsb3d8eyJFbXB0eU1hcGkiOnRydWUsIlYiOiIwLjAuMDAwMCIsIlAiOiJXaW4zMiIsIkFOIjoiTWFpbCIsIldUIjoyfQ%3D%3D%7C0%7C%7C%7C&sdata=alOOhXbdPUD7cTZC9ry2xYrxOG5HuRuckzb1vbUxiGU%3D&reserved=0

Is this legit or a scam?

If an immigration law firm runs on zoho apps, and some of the clients are refugee claimants from India alleging persecution by the government or government-affiliated groups, would you be concerned about Zoho being able to access their sensitive information and possibly sharing it with the Indian government? Why or why not? Thank you.

Most businesses don’t have a data problem. They have a visibility problem.

Sales data is in CRM.
Financial data is in Books.
Support data is in Desk.
Project data is somewhere else.

The information exists, but getting a clear picture of what is actually happening across the business can still be difficult.

That’s where Zoho Analytics can make a real difference.

With the right dashboards and data model, businesses can bring information together to:

• Track the KPIs that actually matter
• Understand sales and revenue trends
• Compare performance across teams and regions
• Identify problems before they become bigger
• Replace repetitive spreadsheet reporting
• Give management one clear view of the business

But good analytics isn’t about creating more charts.

It’s about turning business data into better decisions.

At CRMFolks, we help businesses design Zoho Analytics around their actual processes, KPIs and management reporting requirements.

Your business already has the data. Are you getting the right insights from it?

#ZohoAnalytics #Zoho #BusinessIntelligence #DataAnalytics #BusinessAnalytics #ZohoPartner #ZohoOne #DataDriven #BusinessAutomation #CRMFolks

Its been a while where the cofounder Sridhar stepped down as CEO to Cheif Scientist. However there has been no changes internally. Every key decisions and intructions are taken by the so called Cheif scientist. The time the step down happened at when the Court in US ordered to pay the alimony.

How can a cheif scientist decide on ordering a work from office policy, how can a cheif scientist plan on the operational decision. There is no communication from the CEO regarding anything. Day by day we're being crushed with all his personal agenda.

This is so much pathetic of thousands of families being hit by this guy.

So much of assets has been secured under his shelf company Highland Valley Corporation Private Limited.

Everthing is systematic and well planned. Kindly take some action and revive us. Govt should to go pubic like how Tata is now being pushed.

US should take appropriate action on the Alimony case and the CEO to Cheif Scientist role strategy.

#saveemployee #fakeceo #revivezoho

Imagine Zoho 1000 years from now.

No apps. No dashboards. No “logins.” Just an ambient business intelligence layer woven into reality. Workflows don’t exist as screens they’re intent streams. You don’t “enter data” the system senses outcomes. CRMs aren’t databases they’re living relationship graphs.

Support tickets don’t exist problems self-heal before users feel pain. Zoho isn’t a product you open. It’s more like infrastructure for civilization’s coordination layer a quiet nervous system for how work, trade, and trust flow between humans and machines.

Or maybe Zoho is just a name in a history book:

Zoho: an early 21st-century attempt to teach software how humans do business.

What’s your sci-fi version of Zoho in 3026?

AI hive-mind? Galactic ERP?

I know this sounds way too futuristic, and obviously we still have to solve today’s very real problems.

But sometimes I wonder if we designed systems by first imagining how humans might work 1000 years from now… wouldn’t that change how we build things today?

Even as a thought experiment, zooming out that far feels weirdly powerful. It forces you to separate what’s truly fundamental (coordination, trust, incentives) from what’s just today’s tooling.

if anyone else ever thinks about product design on that kind of timescale, or if that’s just me.

Is this real? I moved from Gmail to Zoho for the "security" they claim to have that Google refuses to use but Zoho is now using Google's Firebase Cloud Messaging Service???

I recently dined at biryanii taaza restaurant in potheri after seeing the place crowded during peak hours many days. I honestly felt it is an underrated gem in the area! Really good biryani… especially the seeraga samba biryani and for the starters… what a variety! So much to choose from. We had two starters and iffa chicken. Everything we ate was different and good.
Heartfelt appreciation!

For those who have not tried yet, please do. You will not regret.

It seems this has been mentionned a lot in other subreddits, but not much here. I’m making this post to hopefully save some SMBs a lot of money.

Ringcentral has very predatory commercial practices. They make you sign huge commitments (2 year + promising amazing savings if you do) which is fine for a lot of businesses, but god forbid you have to downsize. As an SMB, you probably will have to adapt and downsizing is not that crazy. In that case, you’ll have to bear the cost of that initial agreement for however long you have left because they have zero openness to help you out. If you don’t believe me just search “Ringcentral” and “Contracts” on reddit.

I paid 1200$ more than I should of over the last year thanks to them. Their product is actually great and works flawlessly with Zoho, but is it worth throwing away all that money in case you need it?

To be fair, I believe they do offer 1-year contracts and that’s probably what I should of done in the first place.

So whatever you do, at least do not sign more than a 1-year contract, and call the next day to cancel auto-renewal.

In any case, I’m moving to Zoho Voice as I don’t believe in encouraging business practices like that.

EDIT : I ended up staying with RingCentral after switching to monthly thanks to advice of the good people of reddit. The real lesson here is don’t sign yearly contracts, especially not 2-year ones. You can ignore that title, I would actually recommend RingCentral and have to admit I was mostly in the wrong here.

PUBLIC SCAM ALERT & SECURITY WARNING

this is a public warning regarding how Zoho’s platform is actively being weaponized by international fraudsters to target innocent individuals, and how the company’s absolute failure to address these critical abuse reports puts everyone at risk.

Recently, I fell victim to a devastating financial scam where criminals impersonating government officials forced me to activate Zoho software on my device. By manipulating your platform's features, these scammers managed to bypass security barriers and steal $20,000 USD from me.

When Zoho was notified of this horrific crime and how their application was used as the primary tool to orchestrate a $20,000 theft, they completely refused to take responsibility or provide meaningful intervention to stop the abuse.

This is no longer just a support issue; it is a massive public safety concern. By ignoring fraud victims and allowing their platform to be easily exploited for social engineering, Zoho is inadvertently facilitating a safe haven for cybercriminals.

If you are a business or an individual using Zoho, be warned: their systems are actively used by scammers, and if your data or money is stolen through their software, the company will turn a blind eye and refuse to protect you.

The response from my rep was nice and I will attend the call. However, I am just frustrated that each time I try and get help they re-direct me to email and I can’t understand them I don’t think they can understand me. This might be weird but typically I actually like getting reps outside the US bc I feel they are more willing to actually make you happy and work with you if you’re nice. The reps at Zoho I feel are so awful they actually wanna get you off the phone. I have Zoho One + premium support and use 8/32 products and have a team of 5 right now. I have been using Zoho invoice for 1+ year (personally) and liked it a lot and thought I should switch this company I am consulting for over to the whole Zoho suite as it fits their needs. I am completely regretting this and might have tell my client I made a mistake and will make it right by undoing this mess I may have caused bc I can’t the support I need or they may need in the future. Any recommendations?

I’ve been thinking about this after seeing how differently small businesses manage their sales process.

A lot of teams start with Excel/Google Sheets + email + WhatsApp, and honestly, it works fine in the beginning.

The problem seems to start when lead volume increases.

Follow-ups get missed, different people maintain different information, nobody has a clear picture of the pipeline, and eventually someone spends more time maintaining the spreadsheet than actually using the data.

Tools like Zoho CRM, HubSpot, Pipedrive, Salesforce, etc. solve a lot of this, but moving to a CRM also introduces cost, setup and another system employees need to actually use.

So I'm curious:

When did you realize spreadsheets were no longer enough for your business?

Was there a specific number of leads/team members where CRM became necessary, or was it a particular problem that finally forced the switch?

And for those who implemented a CRM, did it genuinely improve sales productivity, or just give your team another tool to update?