Niels B.
A promising product with poor technical support
The product idea is awesome. The pricing is extremely competitive for business use. But the support is disappointing to say the least. I'm on the "basic" paid plan for 30 USD a month, trying to figure out if upgrading would make me more important to Zerotier, because I feel ignored. - Support commitment in subscriptions is fuzzy. All you can choose between is "Ticketed support" (30 USD/month), "Higher priority support" (100 USD/month) and "Highest priority support" (? USD/month). What exactly does that translate into in terms for resolution time? 1 hour? 1 day? 1 week? - No phone / voice / live chat / realtime support. Which means that a critical issue is at the risk of turning into a long ticket thread spanning several days or weeks. There is a chat feature, but it's a "community chat" meaning you can't expect anyone to be available, especially not for a private chat. Maybe there's employees or maybe theres just other users. - Their official documentation is misleading and contains an example on how to secure your network from unwanted traffic, but it doesn't do what it claims to do, since the example code is wrong. So what zerotier teaches it's users about how to secure their network is wrong. I wrote them about this two months ago, but Zerotier hasn't corrected the documentation. Total indifference. - It takes way too long for the zerotier-one client to discover broken paths. Like several minutes. And the client does not attempt to reach the destination via a relay or a moon. This basically means that your client devices are susceptible to random 100% packet loss that can span several minutes whenever a path (a P2P connection between two zerotiered devices) is broken. And paths usually seem to break when one or more of the NAT mappings between them expire - and that happens all the time. - Response times for paying customers on the "basic" plan seem to be 2-4 business days. It should be 24/7 within 1-2 hours to be honest. Even five dollar webhosts can offer this. - You cannot have multiple open tickets at the same time. Combine this with tickets that takes weeks to resolve and you have a trap. - If you have more than one question in your ticket, the supporter shamelessly ignores the additional question. - There is an arbitrary cap on how many characters you can include in your message in a ticket. This means that any complicated request will inevitably produce a follow up reply from you where you elaborate. This translates into arbitrary resolution delay. - You cannot attach files in your tickets. Basically, I really want to use Zerotier as the VPN product in my company, but I'm scared about reliability and I think it's a joke that the company is practically inapproachable for a session with a technical specialist, so we can plan an optimal implementation. All I'm asking for is an hour or two on Skype / remote desktop with someone who knows his game and I'll happily pay $500 for that, if we can resolve our connectivity issues once and for all. Right now I have an open ticket where I've offered to pay for ad hoc support asking them to send me a quote for hourly rates. This was 4 business days ago. No answer. The root / front page on zerotier.com contains an ad for the "ZeroTier Edge" product, which will be shipping in March 2018 but can be preordered today. Today is September 29th, 2018. Which means they haven't updated their own website, on the most important page, for over half a year. I'm not sure what to make of that. Zerotier is solving a very real problem with a very neat solution. So it's disappointing that they don't have the service organisation to pull it off. I think I will have to start evaluating alternative solutions, because I have come to believe that I'm on my own with a somewhat unpredictable product. I'll stay with them for now, but hopefully migrate to something else by the end of the year, so my company has a reliable private network for when our new intranet service go live.