The TOS is confusing, but they told me it is allowed under some circumstances.
Hello,
Thank you for contacting us. I apologize for not being able to respond sooner.
Please note that It is not a problem to have two Proton accounts. However, be aware that having multiple free accounts (e.g. username hoarding, creating bulk sign-ups, creating and/or operating a large number of free accounts for a single organization or individual) is against our Terms of Service. Terms of Service | Proton
While you can have more than one free account — a backup email address — having too many free accounts is not considered an acceptable use of our service.Also, please note that attempting to create multiple accounts will trigger more difficult verification methods such as Email or SMS.
They really should be clearer, but what i get is that they don’t care if what you are doing with the accounts doesn’t otherwise violate TOS and isn’t disruptive (eg 50 free accounts). I wouldn’t get “a bunch” myself, but having two free or multiple paid seems to be safe.
That’s exactly how I started, probably more than 20 years ago with a custom domain.
Yes, there is no shortcut, but I “only” have 50 ish aliases, if I had 500 I would custom domains would be essential but I would never let myself go above 100.
One positive I found was that forcing myself to revisit my contacts led to a review of each one. Quite a few didn’t make it into the new system! And quite a few got new passwords as well as new aliases.
The golden nugget of value here is that we do not have a resilient, independent email alias system.
Beyond the complaint about lack of goodwill (free service) from Proton, OP exposes larger concerns.
What if Proton went out of business?
What if the (alias) domains land on the “blocked” list so many companies no longer accept them?
Changing your primary email is bad enough: changing thousands of aliases adds an additional manual step to that process (1. finding the correct alias for the account 2. generating a new alias to replace it).
I signed up for Proton and SimpleLogin to replace Sneakemail, because many sites no longer accept Sneakemail email domains (blocked as “throwaway” addresses). I am struggling through this process now and it absolutely sucks.
I am using my own domain, but OP correctly points out that you lose anonymity/privacy since all your email aliases can be tied to you in aggregate. Even if I used 10 domains it would still break anonymity.
Right now there’s no way out, as long as email remains the ubiquitous identification/communication pathway.
OP is right, cost for the alias itself is trivial, but we all agree there must be a management and handling infrastructure that does have a non-trivial cost.
I’d love to see a discussion about ways around the problem that maintain privacy and durable access independent of the control of others. Some combination of self-hosting, domain sharing, federated services, and open access. I’m thinking like TOR or Debrid style but for email and aliases.
I’d donate to an open project that created and maintained the infrastructure that solved these problems. Sounds like one Privacy Guides should take on!
Yeah the born Private campaign is not at all what their focus should be. And as techlore has said, Proton almost feels like big tech now, which I agree with. I way prefer the vibe of Tuta as a company. That being said, what alternative would you propose a company should take? If you become reliant on the paid services and then are unable to downgrade then.. not really sure what alternatives there are? I will never pay for these services because I would hate to be in this situation. Just cos you can afford something today, doesn’t mean you can tomorrow.
So far I get away with proton mail free plan, with anonaddy and some proton aliases. With anonaddy you can just turn aliases off until you need them to not use the free bandwidth. When protonmail box fills up I intend to download all .eml files using their CLI tool and then just clear out my inbox in their cloud. Should be sustainable.
I completely understand the original poster; Proton is a lot of marketing. They’ve become exactly what they originally set out to fight, but worse. Proton is becoming the new Google with a closed, paid ecosystem, churning out a multitude of new services without improving the existing ones.
I hate what Proton has become. I’m waiting for Tuta to release their drive service so I can leave the Proton ecosystem for good; I’m really looking forward to it.
Yes, and you can also allocate how much data each person can have, whether they get access to Scribe, and whether 2FA must be used.
So, it’s a little confusing, but this is Proton’s response: You currently have 30.00 GB of bonus storage.
From May 23, 2024 until May 20, 2025 you were using the yearly Unlimited plan = 10GB of storage
On May 20, 2025 you switched to Duo which reset the storage and you had 15GB.
Another year of Duo from May 20, 2025 = plus 15GB
So, it seems like when I upgraded from Unlimited to Duo my bonus 10GB was upgraded to 15GB automatically. The reason I thought that I ‘lost’ the 10GB (or 15GB as it seems) is because of my previous point - in a Duo (or Family) plan you then have to go in and allocate who that extra storage goes to, whereas in the Unlimited plan it just gets added to you.
I’ve been a loyal Proton customer since 2015. I came to the same conclusion as you when I tried out Proton Pass. After using it for about a week without a hitch, I used the password generator on my iPhone to encrypt some data. Proton Pass’ UI is the same on all platforms, and when you use the password generator, it saves each password under a “history” page accessible with a click. But unbeknownst to me, the Proton Pass iPhone app (unlike every other platform) didn’t automatically save passwords generated in the Password Generator. The clipboard expired before I could manually create a record and the data was lost forever.
This would be bad enough if it was a bug; a password manager that sometimes doesn’t save passwords shouldn’t make it through testing. But it turned out this problem had existed for almost two years. Proton was aware of it, and their own forums had hundreds of complaints from people who lost access to accounts and data, expecting the generated passwords to be saved like they are on every other platform. Proton’s response was to just blithely state that “Generated password history is not yet available on Proton Pass for iPhone,” as if this was some novel bonus feature.
It would have been such an easy problem to solve. But despite the steady stream of complaints, it took them two years to add the password generator history button to the iPhone app.
Proton has turned into Nord. They’re now a marketing firm that happens to also make privacy/security products. They are totally unresponsive to their customers and only seem to care about their advertising affiliates.
Hello, this is my first post on privacy guidelines.
I just want to mention that there is a lot of irrelevant talk in this discussion thread, but the original poster I think is unfair/ungrounded to critique Proton in my opinion. If they give you services you no longer want to pay for, it’s up to you to find a solution not them. If you fail to pay for your car insurance it’s you to find an alternative not the car insurance. You can argue they aggressively use marketing tools to get people but if people might know, it’s very hard to change people’s behaviour to use some different software. Especially if you want to reach the average person, and not some educated user. So Proton should get a lot of praise of what is trying to do, compete with google. When you set up proton and all the alias emails, keep in my that at some point you might have to leave proton for something better. Make a list of all the aliases and be ready to change them. Be smart with modern technology. I use proton free with 3 accounts so that I’m not ‘locked’ into their system.
As I said be smart with technology and ultimately you are responsible for yourself, companies just offer you options.
How it that different from what Proton is doing? Just because they have fewer services, doesn’t mean more half baked and vendor locked stuff is not on its way here too, but agree on Proton. They’ve long hit Google level of revulsion for me, but at least Google stuff works great.