Protons pricing is genuinely terrible. Look at their flagship products:
Proton VPN - $4.99 per month if you pay yearly, and $9.99 if you pay monthly: 100% increase.
Proton Mail - $3.99 per month if you pay yearly and $4.99 if you pay monthly: 25% increase.
Proton Pass - $1.99 per month if you pay yearly and $4.99 if you pay monthly: 150% increase.
Why is this a problem?
How can I be sure Proton will be private in a year? - Alot of services don’t even exist in a year. How will I know that Proton will be the same, privacy respecting company in a year?
How can I be sure if I even want their services in a year? - What if another provider comes along in a month or two thats significantly better, and I’m still stuck with Proton’s objectively worse plan. This is just anti-consumer.
Common rebuttals: I’ve talked about this to a lot of privacy people in real life, and this is some of the things they tell me:
“Proton has been private for 10 years, why would they change now?”- I don’t know. If I knew, everyone would know, and no one would use Proton. But, a one year commitment is a long time. Remember skiff? They were honestly amazing. And in a span of a couple months, they went from a really good choice to a non existent one. I’m not saying Proton doesn’t have safeguards in place to make sure that doesn’t happen, like being owned by a non-profit and being one of the biggest names in the privacy space, but trusting that Proton will be private for a year - a pretty long time (or god forbid their 2 year plans) - is kind of a joke. We just don’t know what would happen, and blindly putting our trust in the company is the antithesis of what this entire website is all about.
“Proton’s services are really good, why would you want to switch?” - They are. No doubt. But most are unusable for me. I use mailbox.org, mullvad, bitwarden, and addy.io. I use linux, so the VPN is basically unusable for me, theres no E2EE encryption for the desktop without the mail bridge, so I end up using mailbox.org in a browser. So, I really can’t use / don’t need ProtonVPN and ProtonMail. I really can’t justify paying for them when not only can I not use them, they cost way too much for a monthly buyer like me.
“Just get the Proton Unlimited plan!” - My current privacy setup (as stated above) is mailbox.org, mullvad, addy.io, and bitwarden. This comes out to about $9.80 USD per month paid monthly, while Proton Unlimited is $12 per month. If any one of these companies switch up, maybe become closed source or get bought by an ad company, I can easily switch to another service (maybe not email, but mailbox.org has been around longer than proton, and I trust them more). If Proton gets bought by an ad company or becomes closed source, all my eggs just got sat on by the basket-sitter.
Proton is not a bad company, but having a healthy level of distrust is basically required to maintain privacy, and I don’t think anyone should be making an exception for Proton. Having high discounts on yearly plans and artificially increasing the prices of the monthly plans is a quantity discount trying to lock people into their service; an inherently anti-privacy and consumer practice.
They are a non-profit company and they don’t need any funding. Their financials are pretty much stable, and there is no risk of them to getting sold to some shady company like Skiff.
If you don’t want to commit yearly, then pay more. It is a normal policy for all companies. It is not logical to provide same pricing for short term users and long term users (except Mullvad, they are awesome)
I agree; I’m pretty sure mailbox.org also does this, but its nowhere as much of an increase as 100% or 150%. 20%, even 30% lower price for long term users are perfectly fine, but 150% is literally just anti-consumer and anti-privacy
Mailbox.org gives 2 months free when you pay for a year, but they cost a lot. 9 Euro per month for one user with the Premium package. Standard package is logical choice when you are on budget, but 5 GB space is too low.
But I agree with Proton pricing, price difference is very high monthly vs yearly prices.
It’s not anti-consumer or anti-privacy because they do not have the option that YOU in particular would like to see.
Either commit to the longer, cheaper subscription if that is what you want or don’t. Most people don’t change their email all the time so I think it’s more important that the annual/bi-annual subs are cheap than the short-term ones.
In about a month there will probably be a Black Friday sale @ Proton where you usually can save another 30-50% on the long-running plans.
Can you explain to me how what I’m saying is not objective? Is greatly incentivizing people to not use to most private option anti-privacy? Is doing predatory pricing practices, like giving a 150% discount to those who pay yearly not anti-consumer? I try to be as unbiased and objective as possible, so please respond with a more fleshed out response than “that’s just your opinion.”
This pricing also applies for all their other services, (VPN, Pass, calendar, drive) not just mail.
Also, one time a year where their pricing is less predatory does not make up for the other 342 (I am assuming the deal is going on for two weeks) days of the year.
The definition of predatory pricing is explained here:
… and it’s something completely different “commercial pricing strategy which involves the use of large scale undercutting to eliminate competition.”
If anything their prices are a bit on the higher side even for the long-running subs.
I fail to see why using a sub for a month is less private than an annual sub.
If you want to change your email all the time then yes, ProtonMail’s pricing is not optimal for that but that doesn’t make it less private or anti-consumer.
Most consumers will chose an email/VPN and stick to it for a long(er) time and PM’s pricing strategy just reflects that.
To be short on this topic. I think OP has some valid point in a cost discussion but not sure that it applies any privacy implication related to the forum main focus. 100% or more for the monthly subscription is quite a big penalty. Although, it is their pricing police and they charge whatever they want but for a consumer that is quite a disappointing pricing gap if we are talking in that aspect.
I just hope they don’t read this and decide to increase the annual price to short the gap.
There is no way to tell that, never was, never will be. Lot of “healthy looking” company go kaput, you will have to “trust”. They were funded by Horizon EU funding, IIRC, so the chances of them saying and being privacy oriented is significantly higher than not. Their entire shtick is privacy-oriented, if you remove that, they cease to exist, imho.
What if another provider comes along in a month or two thats significantly better, and I’m still stuck with Proton’s objectively worse plan.
There are too many whatifs in the world to consider, if something better comes up, you may not use it for next 11 month in worst case scenario, I guess? Now, going back to your first “what if”, how will you be sure that the company that just popped on to your radar is gonna be “privacy oriented” or even will exist for more than 6 months?
This is just anti-consumer.
No, the closest analogy that I can think of would be It's just expensive to be poor. You buy an yearly pass of pubic transport, you pay less. You buy things in bulk in Costco, you get discounts. I guess, in theory this is the same principle in play here. Whether or not you want to support this is a different discussion about society, capitalism, and ideology but there is nothing here which in current definition says “anti-consumer”.
I use all the Proton services, except Proton Pass and frankly Proton is starting to annoy me by multiplying the services, mail, drive and VPN it was a market demand, but Proton Pass and especially Proton Wallet no!
Instead of improving their existing services on all platforms, especially Linux (Proton VPN useless, mail still in beta, drive unavailable) Proton prefers to release new subscriptions and services that nobody (few people) have asked for.
I’ve seen rumours on Reddit and their annual questionnaires received by email that Proton is working on a search engine and even an email service, really pitiful.
The only thing that makes me stay with Proton is its cheaper yearly price rather than taking other services separately, I’m waiting for Tuta’s drive to know if I’m staying or not.
Thats silly. You should expect to be able to get a refund from any product you buy. A sign of a good business is their refund policy. Stuff happens, sometimes even good products are not the right fit and need to be refunded.
IIRC at somepoint Proton will just give you a credit on your account instead of an actual refund (which is not nearly as useful in the situation you lay out) but @Lukas feel free to correct me if I am wrong on that.
Also not sure what you are using Proton for. It seems like most of what Proton offers you use an alternative already…
To @xra point, I do find it a bit annoying that Proton basically incentivizes breaking their TOS because its cheaper to make multiple accounts for each service then it is to bundle.
Mozilla is still not using chromium engine, it’s still working fine with uBO, is still by far one of the best browsers depending on your threat model.
I personally only use Proton for their VPN, but might consider their unlimited plan because it looks quite nice. I have an “MS365” subscription which includes storage, but Proton has started to look nicer day by day.
I call it less private because one year is a long time, and the company could change a lot in a years time. If it changes to a non-private way, you still paid for the non private version of it.
Also, your completely right. After researching it more, it looks more like second degree price discrimination. I will edit my responses and post accordingly. Thank you for bringing it to my attention!
I don’t agree that its wrong to discount annual/biannual pricing, services have valid reasons for preferring long term consistent customers, and giving a little incentive towards that seems okay.
But I do agree with the criticism that Proton pricing discrepancy between unlimited and a la carte, and the desire to push everyone towards the unlimited bundle is too heavy handed, and limits user choice. It does create a situation where it feels like you have to buy into proton wholesale, or not, there isn’t a very cost effective middleground between all or nothing. This is a negative, for those who want to preserve flexibility or who don’t want to rely on a single 3rd party for everything. And is also a negative for anyone who isn’t new-ish to privacy and already has a set of services they are happy with.
This is especially problematic for Linux users, since some of Proton’s core services (VPN, Drive) are subpar on Linux compared to other OSes. For Linux users especially, the ability to choose software a-la-carte is important since Linux support can vary so much, we often need to be a lot more deliberate in choosing software which has good Linux support.
I think for people who need Mail + Drive + VPN, Proton unlimited is a great option, and a great deal, but for those of us who either couldn’t use, or don’t need 1 or 2 of those core 3 services, unlimited isn’t very attractive, nor is the a la carte pricing. I’m not mad at Proton for this, they have their reasons I suppose and I’m likely not the target audience, but it does keep me from moving beyond the free tier, until either the core services improve, or the a la carte pricing drops.
