# I ditched Gmail for Proton Mail hoping for privacy, but the grass wasn't greener

**URL:** https://discuss.privacyguides.net/t/i-ditched-gmail-for-proton-mail-hoping-for-privacy-but-the-grass-wasnt-greener/27696
**Category:** News
**Tags:** article, software
**Created:** 2025-05-19T06:08:16Z
**Posts:** 43
**Showing post:** 27 of 43

## Post 27 by @PurpleDime — 2025-05-26T17:06:39Z

> [@rescuer-phoniness](#):
>
> I’m pretty against their advertising via signatures approach and not having a free mail bridge to Thunderbird. I can’t in good conscience give money to a company that forces me to delete their advertising on every message. I’ve always been of the opinion that personal email should be free and at a permanent address that isn’t dependent on money so you can stay in contact with people. Protonmail does check that box but it doesn’t shield them from scummy practices like this.
> 
> I used tuta instead usually, but its not very suitable for a main email they get spam filtered a lot.

Personally, I think Proton’s advertising in email signatures is useful to promote privacy. I didn’t think it was scummy until I realized it cannot be removed unless you are a paid subscriber. This is news to me, and you’ve definitely changed my mind on this, and I’ll explain why later.

Although Proton Bridge not being free sucks, I wouldn’t describe most of the things you’ve denounced as scummy.

**That being said, there are things that Proton does that I find “scummy”:**

**1) NOT ALLOWING MULTIPLE PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS UNDER THE SAME ACCOUNT.**

If you pay for **Proton Mail Plus** and you want to pay for **Proton Pass Plus** , **Proton** will not allow you to do so with your **Proton Mail Plu** s account. You either have to upgrade to **Proton Unlimited** (more expensive!) or create a completely separate 2nd **Proton** account for **Proton Pass Plus** (impractical!). This is what I had to do.

I wrote to **Proton** about it, and they told me this was their marketing strategy and that they have no plans to allow multiple subscriptions under the same account.

It makes no sense to me because in both scenarios, **Proton** makes _more_ money than if I just paid for **Proton Mail Plus**. They just make less if I create a separate account for **Proton Pass Plus** instead of upgrading to **Proton Unlimited**.

**Proton** has been around for over a decade, and the fact that they are deliberately creating a subpar experience for those who only wish to pay for 2 **Proton** products shows their disregard for their poorest paying users.

**2) FORCING PEOPLE TO WAIT 2 MINUTES TO SWITCH COUNTRIES ON THE FREE VERSION OF PROTON VPN.**

In and of itself, you could argue that this is not scummy at all. What makes it dip its toes into scummy is the fact this is a limitation that **Proton** recently introduced. For years, they didn’t have this limitation.

Does this limitation bother me all that much? No. 99.99% of the time I don’t need to be connected to a specific country. And I also recognize that **Proton** made some major improvements on their free version.

What bothers me is that this limitation didn’t exist before a couple of months ago. This is why not being able to change your email signature is scummy, because, as far as I can remember, that didn’t use to be the case.

From my experience, I have never, ever, EVER, felt compelled to pay for a freemium app after the developers removed features that were free. Never. Evernote did that, and they never got a dime from me. Instead, I’m paying for both **Notesnook** and **Standard Notes**.

**TL;DR:**

**Introducing _new_ limitations on the free versions of Proton VPN and Proton Mail is to me nothing short of [enshittification](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification) and a [dark pattern](https://www.deceptive.design/types/obstruction). You could argue it’s mild (for now), but it’s still that. On the other end of the spectrum, I believe it is undeniable that deliberately not allowing multiple subscriptions under the same Proton account to coerce users to upgrade to Unlimited qualifies as full-blown aggressive [dark pattern](https://www.deceptive.design/read-the-books) and [enshittification](https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/).**

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