Privacy Service Subscriptions (Best Value)

Questions
1

Hey all,

I am currently in the process of trying to reduce my monthly subscription fees because I feel like they have gotten away from me. I would ideally like to have everything consolidated to a single monthly or yearly payment, but I don’t really think that is going to be possible if I want to stick with independent, privacy-respecting services. So, I’d really appreciate some ideas you all may have to help me get the best bang for the buck. With Black Friday / Cyber Monday deals approaching, I am hoping to have a solid game plan ready to really take advantage of the potential savings.

As it stands, I have been subscribed to Proton Duo for about a year now. I was mostly happy with the service up until my partner made the choice to move all of our photos/videos away from Google Photos (This is a big win that I am very happy about) and we quickly learned that Proton Drive is definitely not up to the task. The biggest complaint my partner has is that Proton does not offer on-device AI searching, which is a must-have for them because they have a 500GB (and growing) photo collection that they actively like to browse. So, I set up a free Ente Photos account, and after a week of testing they informed me that they were very pleased with the service and searching capabilities.

Since I will need a separate service for photo backups & management, I really don’t want to keep paying for Proton Duo, especially since my partner isn’t yet ready to switch email providers (baby steps) and we don’t make enough use out of the auxiliary services they provide to justify the cost. I personally only use Proton for email, unlimited email aliases and one custom domain. Because of this, I am considering downgrading to Proton Mail Plus + Simple Login to save a considerable amount of money. I do use Proton Drive for cloud backups, but with how bad Proton Drive is (slow uploads, poor organizational tools, etc.), I don’t feel like this is something I want to pay extra for, so I am leaning away from the unlimited plan as a result. My second thought was to simply embrace iCloud+ and pair it with Advanced Data Protection. While this isn’t an ideal situation, I feel like it would still offer strong privacy and security while giving a much better bang for the buck. I’m open to differing opinions on this, but with advanced data protection I feel like Apple’s offerings are much more attractive than they were before. I should also preface this by saying I am not strictly worried about emails being encrypted at rest, because the people I communicate with don’t encrypt their email, so I feel like I don’t truly get the most out of that particular aspect of Proton.

What combination do you all think would provide the best bang for the buck while also being privacy respecting? I’m not sold on any one thing, I just wanted to present a few ideas I had and see what others had to suggest. Right now the front runner for me is Proton Mail Plus + Simple Login + Ente Photos. I really wanted the whole Proton suite to work out, but drive is just too half-baked (in my opinion).

I am mostly just trying to protect my personal data from the general public, criminals, mass surveillance, and big tech (To an extent. I try to improve things in this aspect when it is possible and makes sense, but I won’t go to such an extreme that I make my life more difficult. Instead, I am just very mindful of the trade-offs and use the built-in privacy controls to manage things the best I can).

The bare minimum of what I need:

  • Private email (Calendar / custom domain)
  • Photo backup/management similar to Google Photos
  • Unlimited email aliases (I use a different alias for every service)

What I’d ideally like to have:

  • Private email (Calendar / custom domain)
  • Photo backup/management similar to Google Photos
  • Unlimited email aliases (I use a different alias for every service)
  • Private notes (Right now I use Obsidian and sync with Proton Drive)
  • Private cloud storage for files/backups (50GB - 100GB is enough for me)

I really look forward to hearing all of your ideas to try and help me find a good solution that doesn’t have me paying an arm and a leg. Thanks for taking the time to read my post!

2

Here is the problem, you are not really going to save much money because you still need a decent photo service with at least 500GB space.

Based on those requirements…

Pass+ - This provides SimpleLogin premium
Ente Pro - This gives you 1000GB for storage and photo needs.
Downgrade the rest of your Proton services to the free versions

That puts you at about $13/month if you pay the annual pricing. Which is slightly cheaper then duo. The real upside is you are not paying for things you either don’t use or don’t like.

1 Like
3

That’s a lot of info. Thanks for providing all the context though. It helps.

I recommend the following for several reasons:

  1. ProtonMail Plus + Proton Pass (will have Simplelogin with it). I suspect however you’ll have to get this separately as Proton does not allow custom selection of premium plans for their products. Hope this changes in the future.
  2. Ente Photos is best for photos so good choice here.
  3. Depending on your notes needs or how you use your notes - Proton Docs may be enough. If not, Notesnook is the best option I feel. Their free option works enough for me but if you’re a heavy user and have a lot of notes, you may want to consider the premium plans.
  4. Cloud Storage - I recommend the affordable Koofr plans (which you can buy anonymously too if you want from the ProxyStore) and pair that with Cryptomator. This set up works really well on all desktop OSs last time I checked.

Bonus: Mullvad VPN for your internet obfuscation needs.

All that said, you may also want consider downgrading to Proton Unlimited for 1 person. You get VPN, Docs for Notes, Mail, Pass, and others obviously. If you personally don’t need Ente Photos capabilities, then Proton Drive works well. If you didn’t know, Proton Drive has been updated a while ago and it has become a lot better so I recommend giving it another try before you discount it fully. It works well for all your basic needs and there’s no issue or rarely an issue with sync anymore.

There are a few ways to go about this. Depends on how you want it and how much you can or want to spend for all of it. Sometimes there are no good answers for some things you want and some things you don’t when the goal is to save money and get more value for all the premium privacy tools you want.

1 Like
4

@JG solution provides more features but I don’t see anyway its not more expensive then Duo. Which could be an issue if money is a factor.

Assuming you need an Ente plan with at least 500BG (for partners photos) and a Koofr plan with at least 50GB (based on your “ideally” points) I got it priced at a bit over $16/month.

That’s assuming you stick with the free version of Proton VPN and don’t go with Mullvad, which would put things at around $22/month

:100:

5

Thanks for the replies. Just to add a little bit of context, at the end of the day I do feel comfortable spending around $40/mo total for everything. I’m just trying to kind of piece things together so I am not paying more than I really should for any one particular service. I also prefer to purchase annual plans when possible. I’d like to limit the up front cost to about $600 total (waiting until Black Friday or Cyber Monday because I feel like I will get the best bulk pricing here). I’m just trying to minimize my “waste” (like buying a suite of services and then going out and subscribing to another service just because it has better features).

I think my title is a bit misleading because it says saving money is the goal, which I feel like is fairly interpreted as spending less money. I should have changed the title to reflect that I am just trying to get the best value for the money spent. That’s completely my fault.

6

The only thing I can think of that may fit your needs is self-hosting NextCloud with something like the NextCloudPI.