While much of India, especially the government, is only now waking up to Zoho, I’ve been a quiet admirer and early adopter for nearly 15 years. To be honest, I’ve been more of a free rider than a paying customer, though I do hope that changes one day.

My first brush with Zoho was through their custom mail service, which offers five free email accounts, a small but powerful setup for my tiny team. From there came experiments with Zoho Cliq and Zoho Meetings. I never quite warmed up to their mail interface. It’s a bit clunky, somewhat reminiscent of Zimbra, but Zoho Meetings impressed me deeply. It’s cleaner, faster, and, in my experience, far more reliable than Zoom. I’ve also dabbled in Zoho Campaigns, using it for modest email bursts of about 80–100 addresses at a time.

What drew me most to Zoho, though, was never the product lineup alone. It was their philosophy. The pride of being bootstrapped. The courage to say no to investors. I’ve always believed funding can cloud a founder’s vision, forcing compromises that dilute originality. Zoho, in contrast, stood tall, growing quietly, on its own terms.

Equally admirable has been their rural vision – building offices away from metros and creating jobs closer to employees’ homes. It isn’t just business; it is social design.

For years, Zoho thrived on word of mouth and PR. Only last year did I begin to see its ads – at enterprise events, airports, and even on cars (CASHurDRIVE Marketing Ltd., incidentally, handles their automobile ad campaigns. Raghu Khanna of CadhurDrive is another entrepreneur whom I respect a lot. There are few entrepreneurs from Himachal who have made disruptions).

Yet, when I ask small businesses why they still hesitate to shift to Zoho’s cloud, one issue cropped up repeatedly – storage costs. Google Drive, they said, simply offers more for less. For small creative agencies that handle heavy photo and video files, Zoho’s pricing can climb steeply.

Still, the larger truth remains: time for ‘Made in India’ tech is now. Zoho’s persistence and principles prove that innovation doesn’t have to bow to global giants or foreign funds. Zoho is the beacon of Atmanirbharta.

I’ve even downloaded Arattai, Zoho’s Indian messaging app. Sadly, it feels like a ghost town – lots of contacts on-board, but no one actually using it. I’ve also resisted switching from Firefox to Ulaa (Zoho’s browser). Chromium-based browsers, to me, feel restrictive. Firefox still wins with its multi-account containers – a godsend for juggling multiple logins of a single service – and its tab management, which lets me scroll endlessly without tabs shrinking to tiny favicons. I suspect Ulaa inherits same Chromium limitations.

So, while I may not yet be a paying Zoho customer, I remain a loyal observer, a believer in its quiet revolution. And if the Zoho story tells us anything, it’s that being stubbornly independent can sometimes be the most profitable kind of madness.