[blfr]

A good enough solution on par with the competition is exactly the right choice for a business 95+% of the time though. Your company probably shouldn't compete on email/calendar/vpn/filesharing/OS/spreadsheets/CRM/reporting... all of these are great as SaaS.

And Google Workspace is a vastly superior solution to its predecessor offline or semi-online office suites, allows live collaboration and works across devices. Hubspot has a real, usable mobile app. Even Power BI is a step up from whatever pile of excels used to pass as reporting.

[Forgeties79]

HubSpot’s mobile app is so buggy for me. Anytime i’m tagged on a ticket comment I have to open the app first then click the link to it or it just opens the app and does nothing.

Overall it works pretty well but I don’t know. It feels kind of clunky, especially with all the information it presents. Admittedly I don’t know how they can get all that information cleanly on a small screen, so I’m not really blaming them. It’s just been my experience

[ocdtrekkie]

You are talking about paying per user rent to access software we figured out how to build well thirty years ago. Nobody should pay rent for an office suite.

[blfr]

We didn't figure it out then though. I used office suits 15 years ago. They didn't work like Workspace or even m365 today. You needed to sync files by yourself, sharing and access control were rudimentary at best.

Most importantly, there was no way to support my currently bog standard workflow of making docs and notes on a computer, sharing it with colleagues in a chat with a simple link, where 2-3 people can edit it at the same time, and then checking out their changes or referring back to the notes on a phone.

Not to mention stuff like presenting a deck directly into an online meeting where participants can browse ahead or look through the slides back.

All of that is easily worth $10/seat/mo in productivity and would be very difficult to configure not as a service.

[skydhash]

> very difficult to configure not as a service.

Why would it be? I understand your point about convenience, but not the difficulty of it.

[ocdtrekkie]

A server in my house has "just done all of this" for like ten years. I had to run one command to fix it recently. It has the capacity to support dozens of users.

The idea some shared document editing is worth $10/seat/month is absolutely insane. We have built a temple to madness.

[jryle70]

So you are saying everyone who wants to share a document has to either have their own server, or log in to a server hosted by someone else?

What if that host goes down when the user needs it most, who is responsible for that? Who is doing backup or recovery? What if there is a security breach and users lost data? because Internet access is a must if the server is shared among "dozens of users".

If $10/month is insane, how much should it cost and why?

[orev]

Right, because Amazon and Microsoft never go down… Look, you had some good points, even if arguable, but the whole downtime bogeyman is just pure cloud provider marketing to drum up FUD. You might be surprised to know that many cloud providers, even the big popular ones, don’t handle backups for you.

[ocdtrekkie]

Well I spend about $5/month over the lifetime of a setup that could support like fifty users. So that's like ten cents a month. Maybe add a healthy Big Tech size profit margin, charge 50 cents a seat a month?

[cwmoore]

Is that 50c price a question or an offer? Sounds pretty good but does it interop with Drive and 360? SLA terms? Just window shopping…