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.
Yea, my dumbass used Google voice as my main 2fa number and recently lost access to it. Can't get it back and I'm locked out of everything. Don't be like me. Google really can't be trusted for personal or business use. If I could talk to a human and pay $100 for it I would.
Problem is eventually you need it for Google Ads, or YouTube really for many things. And none of them are "vital" if they go wrong. They aren't core income pipeline parts. And then you get sucked in.
B2B and go to a conference? Where are you putting your video demo reels/talks? YouTube
Consumer and testing marketing messages for something non-consumer? Google Ads.
Your B2B client wants you to provide your SaaS via a private endpoint on GCP? What else are you going to do than use GCP?
Then once you are on it on company computers, it's a short walk to Google Docs and then Google Workspace, etc.
Needing Google occasionally is understandable but keeping it to a minimum and as disconnected as possible from core business functionality, and as replaceable as possible if things go sideways with its brainless algorithms, is absolutely doable.
Please, enough justification for why almost anyone generally "needs" Google.
For example:
>B2B and go to a conference? Where are you putting your video demo reels/talks? YouTube
Really? Simply no alternatives exist? I guess Vimeo is just a curious internet legend.
>Your B2B client wants you to provide your SaaS via a private endpoint on GCP? What else are you going to do than use GCP?
So explain to the client why you prefer not to use Google, but if they insist, then keep it specific to them and avoid it for anything generally essential to your business. You state this as if nearly a dozen alternatives to Google Cloud don't exist.
>Then once you are on it on company computers, it's a short walk to Google Docs and then Google Workspace, etc.
Don't take that short walk then, take another one instead.
The point is that alternative solutions do usually exist and even where Google becomes unavoidable, it absolutely shouldn't mean having to fully embrace its services.
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.
Same here. When you say your own email, do you mean Fastmail? I love Proton and they got me and my SO largely off of Google. Fastmail is just so good, I’m going to migrate everything there eventually.
> 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.
Are you saying they made it so that you cannot send replies with less than one full line of text? I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of Proton doing that.
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.
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.
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.
The backup mitigates the problem because, if you are banned, which only happens to fools and fakes, you can take the backup and set it up on another service. Sure, you lose a couple of days of time migrating, but that's not a reason to avoid choosing a better solution.
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.
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.
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.
You're a fool if you believe handing over metadata like your personal phone number so you can be tracked is an improvement. That's not email and not a replacement for GPG, something that actually works properly. Session is a superior app for text replacement. I think you need to find new blogs that don't offer crap advice.
Session started as a fork of the Signal client/server to use identifiers that are not phone numbers (perfectly sensible) but having deviated from the known primitives of the Signal protocol and omitting PFS gives me pause.
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.
Yea, my dumbass used Google voice as my main 2fa number and recently lost access to it. Can't get it back and I'm locked out of everything. Don't be like me. Google really can't be trusted for personal or business use. If I could talk to a human and pay $100 for it I would.
I used to live in the US and use voice as my primary number for everything. I don't think there is a better option.
Just use it everyday and you'll be good.
Problem is eventually you need it for Google Ads, or YouTube really for many things. And none of them are "vital" if they go wrong. They aren't core income pipeline parts. And then you get sucked in.
B2B and go to a conference? Where are you putting your video demo reels/talks? YouTube
Consumer and testing marketing messages for something non-consumer? Google Ads.
Your B2B client wants you to provide your SaaS via a private endpoint on GCP? What else are you going to do than use GCP?
Then once you are on it on company computers, it's a short walk to Google Docs and then Google Workspace, etc.
Needing Google occasionally is understandable but keeping it to a minimum and as disconnected as possible from core business functionality, and as replaceable as possible if things go sideways with its brainless algorithms, is absolutely doable.
Please, enough justification for why almost anyone generally "needs" Google.
For example:
>B2B and go to a conference? Where are you putting your video demo reels/talks? YouTube
Really? Simply no alternatives exist? I guess Vimeo is just a curious internet legend.
>Your B2B client wants you to provide your SaaS via a private endpoint on GCP? What else are you going to do than use GCP?
So explain to the client why you prefer not to use Google, but if they insist, then keep it specific to them and avoid it for anything generally essential to your business. You state this as if nearly a dozen alternatives to Google Cloud don't exist.
>Then once you are on it on company computers, it's a short walk to Google Docs and then Google Workspace, etc.
Don't take that short walk then, take another one instead.
The point is that alternative solutions do usually exist and even where Google becomes unavoidable, it absolutely shouldn't mean having to fully embrace its services.
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.
Same here. When you say your own email, do you mean Fastmail? I love Proton and they got me and my SO largely off of Google. Fastmail is just so good, I’m going to migrate everything there eventually.
> 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.
Are you saying they made it so that you cannot send replies with less than one full line of text? I don’t think I’ve seen or heard of Proton doing that.
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 bit the bullet and am trying it out. I'll let anyone who is interested know how it goes.
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.
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.
Lots of stories about having google account connected to adwords locked out for various reasons, not all valid.
There's are several third party Google backup services for the paranoid...
It's not about backups - it's about loss of ongoing use infrastructure
The backup mitigates the problem because, if you are banned, which only happens to fools and fakes, you can take the backup and set it up on another service. Sure, you lose a couple of days of time migrating, but that's not a reason to avoid choosing a better solution.
> which only happens to fools and fakes
Lots of people have directly stated otherwise. Are you super sure they're wrong?
> if you are banned, which only happens to fools and fakes
If that is truly how you feel then I pity the fools who give you their business.
it can happen to you
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.
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.
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.
For truly sensitive communication, it’s better to use Signal: https://soatok.blog/2024/11/15/what-to-use-instead-of-pgp/
You mean the company with a HQ in the US?
You're a fool if you believe handing over metadata like your personal phone number so you can be tracked is an improvement. That's not email and not a replacement for GPG, something that actually works properly. Session is a superior app for text replacement. I think you need to find new blogs that don't offer crap advice.
They resisted this change for years, but eventually gave in and fixed it. You no longer need to hand out your phone number.
https://signal.org/blog/phone-number-privacy-usernames/
Nitpick: AFAIK, revealing a phone number is required for registration. But it’s no longer required in order to communicate with other Signal users.
Session started as a fork of the Signal client/server to use identifiers that are not phone numbers (perfectly sensible) but having deviated from the known primitives of the Signal protocol and omitting PFS gives me pause.
Session was the go to couple years ago but now SimpleX chat is imo superior with proper PFS even quantum resistent and better UX.
What kind of threat model do you operate under where Signal Technology Foundation knowing (one of) your phone numbers is a large risk?
The fact that signal knows my phone number doesn't bother me.
The fact that anyone who knows my phone number can know that I use signal does bother me.
May I ask why you’re bothered by this fact?