Has anyone used Proton Business Suite rather than Google's for a startup?

It's amusing to see people here continuing to recommend Google tools for core aspects of some shiny, fragile, new startup despite so many, many posts and comments on HN having been placed time and time again describing how arbitrary that monster can be about cutting you completely down from whatever it offers you for some bullshit algorithmic reason or another, and with near zero customer service recourse.

By now Google often acts worse than the complaints departments of many government agencies, which at least usually by law have to have a human accesible to you somewhere along the line. Yet it keeps getting recommended by either the clueless or the indifferent.

At a startup you can run your company on the communication tools provided in Google workspace. There's much more to this than calendar and email. Tagged comments for coordinating actions, using gdocs with meetings and transcription and summarization by Gemini, communal editing and sharing, the gdocs history, sheets and slides, backup and logging tools, domain management and more. If you use proton, you get Google workspace from 15 years ago, at best.

I suggest Zoho one. It's been in service for many many years. It's not as feature rich as Google or MSFT, but their service is fantastic and gives you all options a small business needs (office, marketing, CRM, sales, HR, Finance among others).

https://www.zoho.com/one/

I bit the bullet and am trying it out. I'll let anyone who is interested know how it goes.

I pay for it. I dont do anything super fancy, and its been working fine for two years now. I think the cost is low enough that I'm happy paying and not thinking about email setup, and happy I'm not paying google

In my opinion, E2EE comes with too many compromises to be worth it for most people and/or companies. Proton wasn't evolving quickly enough, so I switched to Fastmail.

Email aside, no CardDav/CalDav is a dealbreaker for me.

I am bootstraping, and have used proton for years as my only email, but have my own email now, and am slowly backing out of proton. The horrible way that they extort by limiting and degrading a service is only part of the problem.They degraded email replies at one point, to a tiny "page" with less than one full line of text. There is more, but proton is not worth the effort to remember and detail all of it.

I will use google or any other service for building up an advertising presence. And keep the proton, until everything is moved. And then again, pragmatism might decide in favor of useing the proton service, but only as the core of my business is seperate,and will spread my add bucks around, so I feel safe. Currently have NO guggle anything, because of past denial of service, and will only use them for the advertising side as well.

I have used it now for almost 7 years running a law firm. It's worked great for exactly our use case: privileged emails, including attachments, can be time and passworded with legit TNO encryption. I initially used nextcloud/webDAV for our own calendar, but switched over recently to protonmail and it hasn't been an issue. Some storage space is useful. Haven't used the VPN. It's a boutique firm. We have only 4 employees. YMMV

I'd consider Synology, upfront investment but if you really want privacy and control they have a nice suite of tools you host yourself on your NAS.

I am also interested because of Proton’s commitment to privacy and Google’s commitment to…the opposite. But I would think Proton will not (yet?) have the type of controls most businesses need to administer a company wide service and manage confidentiality, security, etc.

may i ask whats the horror with adwords?

email wise whats cumbersome with proton is it tries to upsell me again and again with its add-ons.

on google workspace i can say the best advantage is how almost 90% other sites out there supports signing in with google. and it's also cheap at $6 per head, and it doesnt harass you with upsells unlike proton.

I use Zoho, cheap and has more services. In Africa they even give us localised prices.

I don't know about their business suite.

I've used their calendar and email. The calendar has had issues over the past few months where it would revert unexpectedly and silently back to a previous date (like they reverted to backup but no notification), with all changes and appointments changed after that date being lost.

Some of the email features are very dependent on browser features where you can't set them manually for example timezones impact all visible dates among both apps, and are derived from the metadata of the client which don't update to the current date/time but to last visited time.

If you happen to be traveling, this can cause missed appointments/confusion when you do the mental gymnastics from your original timezone.

Personally, I don't think its ready for production requirements of business.

Proton is so bad. Full of bugs and edge cases. Use fastmail instead.

Proton suffers from the Lavabit problem but worse, it pretends to offer security and freedom when it does neither and acts as a tool of foreign governments to abuse individuals. Use your own GPG keys and better clients, preferably with self-hosting in Iceland or Sweden.