Proton has a pricing plan called “Unlimited”, and it seems to offer a lot of stuff with a lower price compared to paying for multiple services to achieve the same thing. Is anyone currently paying for it, and if so, how happy are you with it? Are there any flaws you’ve found, minor annoyances, anything you enjoy about it, etc.
I will primarily be using the SimpleLogin integration for unlimited aliases, the VPN for high-speed connections, and the cloud storage for personal files. I combined different services that could offer the same things and then formed a budget and realized that Proton’s Unlimited plan is actually quite low compared the other combined services, but I still want to hear others experience with them.
I’m happy with my Proton Unlimited plan. I only use ProtonMail and SimpleLogin regularly, but even for just those two things alone it’s hard to beat $8/month, and I like having the option to connect to ProtonVPN when I need to.
I am not a fan of Proton Drive, I’ve seen people use it for occasionally sharing large files, but it is not a serious personal file storage platform yet. We’ll see if it gets better when they actually release an app outside of Android, but even when actual desktop clients launch I suspect it will be a while before they are up to par with the desktop clients of major cloud services or even self-hosted options like Nextcloud or Synology.
I don’t know what your file storage needs are, if they are very minimal (i.e. you’re fine with uploading files through your browser manually and you don’t need any device syncing) then Unlimited will be good for you. If not, you maybe should consider buying ProtonVPN standalone and purchasing cloud storage elsewhere until Proton Drive matures.
I’n very happy with it. I feel it’s one of the best investments I’ve made, while also supporting their mission.
Today any VPN subscription is around $5/month, mail anywhere between $3-5/month, cloud storage a few dollars and the same for an aliasing service. Having it all under one plan and ecosystem together and at great value is very convenient.
I believe they do Black Friday deals with big discounts, so you can also potentially grab a heavily discounted yearly subscription next month or so.
Fully agree with Jonah. One other problem I had is that the calendar does not support search. So I am not using that, because it simply is too inconvenient.
This is one of the things I haven’t seen much talk about when it comes to proton (or any other services that use E2EE and stores thing in the cloud).
One of the major downside of E2EE is inability to search on the server side. I think this is not a problem when it comes to client side. This might be a big issue for people who have to search through a lot of stuff(notes/emails/calendar).
[rant]Unfortunately, PG fail to mention this. Just recommend having it for everyone. This article (I don’t have an affiliation with their products) does a pretty good job of explaining E2EE.
Well yeah I would be very okay with the feature not existing should I actually have the ability to sync it locally. Just like to point out that proton actually does allow you to search on emails.
Oh okay. I don’t use ProtonMail, but I heard the search is pretty bad.
I don’t see a need for ProtonMail. Email itself is an insecure platform, and doubt that Proton’s security is better than Google’s security.
Yeah, my cloud storage requirements are pretty low. I currently have my data on only two hard drives, one for daily usage and one as a weekly backup/update. I trust services more than myself or the hardware I have, especially in the environment I am in, to maintain my data longer and more safely, so I’d sleep much better at night knowing that Proton has an encrypted copy of my important stuff.
I could very much just buy a $30 yearly plan with SimpleLogin for my unlimited aliasing along with Proton VPN’s $4.99/month plan to get a lower price, but that’d leave the 500 GB storage that I need, which is very pricey elsewhere. And since I don’t really need the convenience of syncing, I guess I will be going with Proton’s Unlimited plan.
Which calendar service do you use, if you don’t mind me asking? I personally don’t use digital calendars, especially since I’m not in any setting that needs interpersonal interaction.