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One of my clients has a 4-user Enterprise Edition CRM. After a sale is closed they want to scan a number of documents and attach those to the Potential in Zoho CRM. When the job is completed there are a few additional files/documents that could be attached to the Potential as well to keep all of the information together.
When estimating their storage requirements today I realized that they only have 500 MB for the whole organization/account, and a good chunk of that is already used after just a few weeks. And then I was shocked to see that it would cost $1,440 each year for only 5 GB additional storage. Is that correct?
I know everyone has to make money somehow, but that amount is absurd. For comparison, 5 GB of storage at Amazon would cost about $16 per year (including 10 GB / month data transfer). And 50 GB of storage at Dropbox is about $120 per year.
Please let me know what's up with the storage costs quickly because we'll need to come up with an alternate solution.
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@Robert,
We understand your point but the right comparison for storage pricing has to be done with other CRM vendors & not Amazon. Even our own pricing for storage in Zoho Docs(focuses only on file storage) is different.
When considering the CRM application, the primary purpose of the service is not storage. It deals with managing customer database, work flows & customization and we follow a different pricing here.
Regards,
Solomon.
Zoho CRM Team.
Toll Free USA : +1 888-900-9646
Toll Free Europe: +1 800-2255-2424
Email us @ support(at)zohocrm(dot)com
We understand your point but the right comparison for storage pricing has to be done with other CRM vendors & not Amazon. Even our own pricing for storage in Zoho Docs(focuses only on file storage) is different.
When considering the CRM application, the primary purpose of the service is not storage. It deals with managing customer database, work flows & customization and we follow a different pricing here.
Regards,
Solomon.
Zoho CRM Team.
Toll Free USA : +1 888-900-9646
Toll Free Europe: +1 800-2255-2424
Email us @ support(at)zohocrm(dot)com
Solomon,
Storage is a commodity that we can purchase from multiple vendors. We will gladly pay a (reasonable) premium for the added convenience of tighter integration with Zoho CRM. But there's no way you can justify charging $1,440 for something that we can easily purchase from many other vendors for $1,400 less. This kind of pricing just forces us to develop alternatives - it's not even a question - and the alternatives are not really inconvenient.
Maybe my clients are unique, but they already use services like Mozy for backing up desktop computers into the cloud, and Dropbox for document storage in the cloud. So my clients have a general idea of how much they should be paying for storage. They would laugh at me if I told them to pay $1,440 / year for 5 GB of storage at Zoho.
$00.15 per GB per month - Amazon S3
$00.165 per GB per month - Dropbox
$00.50 per GB per month - Mozy
$24.00 per GB per month - Zoho CRM
Leave a comment on Solomon's reply
This is understandable Solomon, but in my opinion Zoho should strive to become much more integrated with all of their applications and have pricing to reflect this.
Users for the most part don't want to use a ton of different applications for managing business relationships, or have to think where was that one document stored, did I store it on my own server, is it in an email attachment, or on a cloud service like Zoho Docs? You want to be able to pull up a customer record and immediately see all the information that is associated with that customer, whether it be an appointment, an email thread, a document, or all the connections they have with your other customers, vendors, projects, etc...
For the document side Zoho has this worked out pretty well, but the cost side of storage can quickly be problematic when you have a need to store things like contracts for every customer forever...which means that instead of storing them in Zoho I will store them on my server where costs per GB are negligible...but it means I miss out on a lot of the productivity enhancing features of Zoho.
One maybe practical suggestion is instead of storing the docs in the CRM itself can you store them in something like Zoho Docs...but include a link to the document within CRM?
Users for the most part don't want to use a ton of different applications for managing business relationships, or have to think where was that one document stored, did I store it on my own server, is it in an email attachment, or on a cloud service like Zoho Docs? You want to be able to pull up a customer record and immediately see all the information that is associated with that customer, whether it be an appointment, an email thread, a document, or all the connections they have with your other customers, vendors, projects, etc...
For the document side Zoho has this worked out pretty well, but the cost side of storage can quickly be problematic when you have a need to store things like contracts for every customer forever...which means that instead of storing them in Zoho I will store them on my server where costs per GB are negligible...but it means I miss out on a lot of the productivity enhancing features of Zoho.
One maybe practical suggestion is instead of storing the docs in the CRM itself can you store them in something like Zoho Docs...but include a link to the document within CRM?
Leave a comment on reid_h's reply
Our CRM offering isn't intended primarily as a document storage solution, more of a database, a very different animal. When we are dealing with databases, lots of memory (RAM) comes into the picture, because to get any kind of performance out of storage, we need to cache the data.
Our Zoho Docs pricing is much lower, of course, running at $3 a month for 5 GB. We are in the process of integrating that with Zoho CRM, so as to offer a scalable document storage option for our CRM customers.
Please stay tuned for this new Zoho Docs integrated storage offering from Zoho CRM.
Sridhar
Sridhar,
The purpose of a Customer Relationship Management system is to organize customer information in a single, convenient, online location, and to streamline sales activities by facilitating communications and access to the necessary information. Are you saying that the Zoho "database" is inappropriate to this application?
Are you recommending as a best practice that documents should not be attached to Contacts, Accounts, Potentials, or other CRM records? (Your storage pricing certainly seems to discourage attachments.) Or are you suggesting that only small documents should be attached? Has your research determined that 500 MB is ample storage for the customer records of a typical company?
Instead of simply discouraging document attachments by charging absurd prices, can you tell us the Zoho recommendation for maintaining customer documents? Perhaps the CRM database should only store a file description and link (URL) to an remote document archive.
Leave a comment on Sridhar Vembu's reply
I think you misunderstood my post. I agree that the current pricing for storage in Zoho CRM is not suitable for storing a large number of documents. I said we will be integrating Zoho Docs within Zoho CRM, so the Zoho Docs storage pricing will apply. We are in the process of doing this integration, and that would meet your requirements for the price point as well as integrated functionality with Zoho CRM.
Sridhar
Leave a comment on Sridhar Vembu's reply
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