Explain all the Proton’s free plans and all the FLOSS software, if there is no “free lunch.”
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Proton VPN currently offers a 24-month plan at $3.59 per month:
Enjoy
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Isn’t the yearly plan $1.99? Sorry, can’t check now. Proton website is blocked at my work.
Edit: I think is the ProtonMail Plus. My wires probably got crossed here.
Black Friday is around the corner, so check proton and windscribe next month.
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They already have Proton Black Friday Deals
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The BF deals are already here (but not advertised afaict) and some differences compared to years past (mail and unlimited for instance are offering the deepest discounts on the 1yr sub instead of the 2 yr sub)
Yes, you were thinking of mail plus (1.99/mo for a year) VPN black friday deal is 2.99/mo for 2 years).
Regardless, one thing to be aware of is Proton’s deals are not recurring. You don’t get a locked in price, so a slightly higher price on a 2yr plan might be more cost effective than a deeper discount on a 1 year plan, and after the term expires it reverts to full price.
Based on what I know, I choose to think of any Proton discounts as “introductory offers” (nice if you needed just a little extra encouragement to subscribe to Proton, but not a meaningful discount over the longterm)
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That’s true, and I am wondering what will happen this year it’s the 2nd year of my subscription. 
IIRC on paper, Proton’s policy has been that discounts are for first time subscribers or when you upgrade to a higher tier plan. But In practice I don’t know what is possible or enforced. I’m interested to know whether you are able to benefit from the discount this time around.
One thing that pushed me to try out Windscribe–despite having mixed feelings about them–is that (so long as you don’t let your subscription lapse) the discounted price was locked in (iirc for life, or possibly it was Vladamir Putin’s life), and my previous VPN didn’t differentiate between new and existing customers with regard to discounts (so signing up on black friday meant that I could just renew every black friday at a discounted rate).
And I just purchased IVPN Pro with Monero for three years with a payment of $220.
Good for you Proton VPN users, and I guess I’ll just sit in the corner with my expensive taste in VPNs. 
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to add to this, if you decide you like the service and want to integrate more into the ecosystem you are able to, for example, get the VPN+ BF deal this year and then upgrade, to Unlimited during the next years BF to get that discount as well.
I ended up going from Drive+ to Unlimited in the same way so I can confirm it works. For me it ended up being cheaper then the services I used instead, even once the discount wears off.
The other way around this limit, especially with something like VPN+ is to just create a new Proton account for it each time the discount expires and then get the same pricing on the new account.
One of my pet peeves with Protons pricing system is it seemingly incentivizes making new accounts to get the best deals even though multiple accounts is technically against the TOS (although I doubt they enforce it often unless you have tons).
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Look into Xeovo VPN. It looks exactly like IVPN and Mullvad but cheaper. I’ll likely check it out once my current subscriptions to these two bigger ones are up for renewal. Happy to hear other’s feedback on it if anyone feels like giving it a whirl.
Note that it won’t have its standalone, branded, quite possibly, polished front-end in the form of a Xeovo specific application such as IVPN or Mullvad, but still, work with WireGuard native application, just takes some manual configuration.
It is just a worth option to ponder, in my humble opinion. If you use it, please post your experience and thoughts on the service! 
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Thanks, but I’ve been using it for over a month.
You’re free to use it, but do know that there is no info about who runs it https://xeovo.com/about/, so this could be a honeypot, or there could be coerced by LE like was the case with Riseup
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same I use proton free and its genuinely good !
unless they are trying to do piracy in which case they are better off with something else
I think they block p2p in their free plan. there is a feature that you need to activate to enable p2p which is only available in paid plan IIRC in proton
You can downgrade your account one month ago before Black Friday, and upgrade again. Otherwise, it’s not possible. There are folks who did not read the terms and try this in the last minute. That did not work of course.
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Are there any consequences if you do this with something like Drive+ ? do you instantly lose anything over the limit or how does that work?
I had Drive+, and I got a discount but for Proton Plus overall.
Just curious, how does this works for Proton Duo. Can you downgrade to two Proton Mail Plus?