Likely this and someone answering without checking.
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Of course, but it’s so much more fun to assume the worst and catastrophize.
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Indeed. I would also argue that an established company A/B testing the price of a long-established product is not on the same level as A/B testing a new logo or a new UI for a popular website.
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I don’t really have much to say about this topic in this post. I just did some research, and to a certain extent, if the company doesn’t take care of itself, the situation could become serious.
I don’t understand what you mean by this.
Could you please elaborate?
To clarify: Proton AG is a for-profit company owned by the Proton Foundation, which is a nonprofit organization. Nonprofits must experiment on pricing to find their donor elasticity.[1] Some nonprofits must discover that information if they want to survive.
I think this kind of misunderstanding could occur in any large organization. The hand doesn’t know what the foot is doing.
As for the AB testing itself, it’s hard to object too much when I still use amazon for some things. This sort of tactic should be kept in perspective, given many of the alternative.
However, I’d much rather deal with a company with a transparent pricing strategy, rather than one fluctuating wildly between sales and sometimes randomly for research. There are plenty of companies that don’t do this and let you know up front how much things will cost.
ProtonVPN users should ask themselves the following questions:
- Why did it take a provider from the same industry to bring this issue to light?
- Why hasn’t Proton AG publicly addressed this issue, even on its blog, before now?
- Isn’t Proton AG supposed to be transparent in its communications with the public?
- Does this action by the company increase or decrease trust, or does it raise more doubts, or even suspicions?
- … (continued).
Transparency comes first.
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It’s a bad look from Proton, they have screwed up the messaging of this, and I’m no fan of “A/B pricing”. But I think you are being a bit overdramatic at this point on the potential impact of this long-term.
Proton screwing up the messaging on this is quite a ways from them leaking user data or introducing targeted ads or whatever.
They should address this and in a perfect world drop this practice. And we should hold companies we view as being the “good guys” accountable when they don’t meet expectations. But we also don’t need to make mountains out of mole hills.
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So, reading between the lines in your text, you yourself have provided the answer if that’s the case. I didn’t say they were “perfect.” I just said “transparency.”
I’ve read quite a few comments from other people on Reddit, and there’s a lot of debate about this “A/B” issue, I’m just observing. There may be a growing divide.
I also straight away have a real problem with them lying about it. They are a company that’s supposed to be encrypting our stuff and keeping us safe. When they outright lie about stuff, it’s a problem. I’ll be switching VPNs when my plan expires.
I also wanted to comment that the enshitification @purpledime mentioned pisses me off. They’ve done other things to make me unhappy but that was the first I’d heard about it, though I’d already made up my mind to not use their VPN when I read about the dishonesty. A privacy company needs to be trustworthy. Fortunately there’s competition for both the VPN and the mail, both of which I use. It’s sad that they did this. They go on about how they have no VC funding and therefore the users call the shots, but it doesn’t seem to be the case when stuff like this happens and they act like every other big tech shit corporation.
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That is priceless it literally says ab test in the source code lmao
They’re now trying to walk back their initial comment: Reddit
To recap, a user noted the price changing. A Proton “General Manager” replied saying there’s no “dynamic pricing” going on. Then users pointed out that clearly there was “dynamic pricing” as the pricing was changing and there’s literal AB test code in the page. Days later, the Proton GM gave the real explanation and weaseled out of any apology by claiming that they never said there was no AB testing, specifically.
In some ways this makes things better, however in other ways it makes it worse. AB testing on price is literally dynamic pricing, so the word games going on there are weird on top of being unnecessary and clearly misleading.
Here’s the clarification follow-up from PetersonProton. Apparently, PetersonProton even confirmed this is A/B testing before this blew up, see end of first quote. So not quite the story it was made out to be.
This topic went very strange very fast - so let me expand and clarify:
Proton VPN is $9.99 per month or $83.88 per year. We used to have an introductory offer for two years at $4.49 per month. There had been a 2-year intro price of $2.99 per month that had been running for a while on some back-to-back campaigns. That price ended at the end of July, and since then it has been $3.49 per month.
As mentioned above, the $2.77 and $3.23 price points in the screenshots were an unintentional calculation error that should have been fixed on Friday.
At the end of a long-standing sale period, we often try an A/B run of the old and new pricing on the website during the transition to see if anything has changed. As explained to answer the speculation on the Reddit post (and as confirmed by others who independently checked it) there is no “adaptive pricing” - it does not vary by browser, OS, etc and is 100% randomised.
So for the past several days some people will still have seen the old cheaper $2.99 price. I had been of the impression that the A/B was already concluded and there must have been some caching going on, but it is actually due to end on Monday, when 100% of people should be seeing the $3.49 intro price.
There was no denial that we were doing an A/B evaluation of maintaining the lower price - even though it would not have been sustainable to keep the $2.99 price point going in the longer term. Indeed, on Friday I had confirmed to someone commenting on the original post that it was indeed a simple A/B that they were seeing. Unhelpfully, my reply there turns out to have been automodded for linking back to the r/ProtonVPN thread.
Response from Redditor ApplicationOdd6070:
Thanks for this. One little request for the future: please say explicitly that you’re running an A/B test.
In your original comment it sounded like you were pretending it was just an offer ending, and some server having to receive the update or something similar.
Because it was obviously not just a glitch (at least part of it) it sounded like you were hiding something.
You may find from other comment I wrote in this post, that I actually could confirm it was a purely randomized A/B test. The issue was that the communication, whether intentionally or not, gave to many the feeling that you were hiding something.
That perception is obviously very problematic, especially for a company in your line of business.
We would have preferred to have had a mentioning of the A/B test in the comment you 2 days ago, it would have looked better.
Response from PetersonProton:
In hindsight - yes indeed, taking the time to say what it was, rather than just what it was not would have saved a lot of hassle. Probably a sign that I should not be attempting to post responses from my phone while travelling (as I am back to doing again now).
If you want, you can add that to the OP.
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Just to clarify: nobody actually saw this AB test confirmation post that the Proton employee claims they made. I don’t see it on their Reddit profile comment history, either, so if this comment was made, the automod completely hid it and it continues to be hidden.
I don’t know if PetersonProton reached out to the mods of the MildlyInfuriating subreddit, but I can imagine them not really caring or just sticking to their modding rules.
For PetersonProton it might have been not even worth it to deal with it before this got big.
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Yeah, all I’m saying is that his claim that he confirmed this was an AB test before even making that comment is currently unverifiable. IMO it also doesn’t excuse making a technically accurate but very misleading comment in the context of that thread. He could have simply again stated that this pricing was an AB test. Instead, he said it’s “not dynamic pricing,” which relies on the reader knowing marketing terminology and not a layperson’s interpretation of the literal English definitions of “dynamic” and “pricing.” He clearly knew what people were actually seeing and commenting on when he made that post.
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Yeah, I think auto-modded comments can not be found like manually deleted comments unfortunately.
If we take the screenshot comment as reference, the parent comment is now three days old, which likely applies to PetersonProton’s comment now aswell.
_
Now that I have read these comments, especially in the context of the third comment I quoted above, one thing seems pretty obvious now:
PetersonProton did not lie, therefore neither did Proton.
Windscribe and Redditors, as well as PG users are misunderstanding what was said or are blindly parroting the falsely spun narrative.
PetersonProton did not deny it was A/B testing (even claims they said it was).
They said it was not adaptive pricing.
It is said it was fully randomized A/B testing, which reports even in this very thread confirm.
A/B testing ≠ Adaptive Pricing
Random A/B testing is also totally fine. Adaptive pricing is what sucks (e.g. travel sites have done this for years). And this is what Proton denies, and what reports back up.
This whole thing is based on a false claim. And Windscribe might have played a leading role in this, unintentional or not.
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(Had to look it up)
I guess some of us are Henry Fonda. 