Proton giving more to the free plans

Man, Proton sure has gone up hill lately.
- My issue with them is that they make their lower tier plans too enticing. I've wanted to upgrade to pro for all the fancy gizmos but the basic mail plan is just too good a deal to upgrade.
  
  Their en-goodifying trend is concerning to be sure, it's almost like they want users to value their service. It's so confusing in today's business world.
  
  Unlimited for seven or so years now, never regretted it in the slightest. I feel like they throw some bonus to you whenever they can - under promise, over deliver. I've been burned a lot by companies that became evil over time, hence I'm careful with praise but so far Proton has been one of the most pleasant customer experiences I had.
- For real. Why haven't I given them money yet?

I still remember how ludicrous it was when Gmail offered 1GB for free. What did Hotmail give us? Like 50Mbs?
- I remember when Google offered "unlimited" for free.
  
  I'm pretty sure I have 1TB of storage on yahoo email.
  ...Yahoo though, so I'm moving to proton
  
  @grue @AbsurdityAccelerator Google bad.
- I started with Hotmail back when it was 2 mb.
  
  Wow. I guess we didn't really send attachments that often back then and 2mb was plenty.
- I think it was 15mb but don't really remember fully
- 15GB. And if you had 365 it's 50GB.
  
  I am talking way back in the day.

I've had ProtonVPN for 3 years now and I have 0 complaints.
It's the only VPN I've ever used that doesn't have less bandwidth on VPN than off. I regularly saturate my gigabit connection for hours at a time with 0 issues or throttling, and tunnel my torrent client's traffic through it 24/7. It also allows me to watch 4k content on mobile data without throttling and circumvent my phone provider's restrictions on hotspot/tethering that they want me to pay $30/month to remove.
Best $5/month I've ever spent.
- If you can, it's actually a bad thing because it means the Telco is violating net neutrality by picking and choosing certain traffic to zero-rate.
  
  Glad to help!
  The reason it works is because telecom providers use DNS-based throttling instead of deep packet inspection to selectively limit bandwidth to video sites. They have a massive list of all the popular streaming sites (YouTube, AppleTV, Netflix, etc.) and then throttle the sites in the list. When providers say "unlimited 480p video streaming" they actually have no clue what video quality you are watching. They just pick a bandwidth limitation that would only allow 480p video to play without buffering.
  They could in theory use network traffic analysis to identify video websites which have bursty bandwidth patterns (due to the nature of video buffers), but this would be more difficult, more expensive, and extremely prone to false positives.
  
  This doesn't make any sense. Your phone service provider can't see what you're doing, but surely they can see how much data you're using.
- My complaint about ProtonVPN is they don’t support custom DNS in the apps. It would be nice to use NextDNS.
- it is gfeat too but.no.port forwarding is a deal breaker :)
- I know NORB has its flaws but I DO get 100MB/s off’a it.

Apparently you have to forward an email address to get the 1GB. I downloaded it and set it up. I was able to lie and say I moved the rest of the applications by just saying done.
- Great incentive, very clever move by Proton. All stuff that’s a good idea anyway but it’s just way too easy to “get around to all that later.” Then it’s 2034 already and Google still has you leashed tight.
  
  Very good - unless Proton Mail is their first email account. Forcing (or strongly encouraging) them to have a Google account first is counterproductive.
  
  Ya know what dude, you're totally right! Fuck it, I'm making the jump! 😃🤘
- Apparently you have to forward an email address to get the 1GB
  you can remove it after

I use them as my main e-mail and my Gmail for all the spam shit.

So serious question. Is proton worth it and easy to work with?
- I've been using their Unlimited plan for over a year. ~$8 a month for half a TB of cloud storage, automatic photo backup on mobile, fantastic web email and mobile email client, and a great VPN that allows for port forwarding and P2P-optimized servers.
  Totally worth it for me. Great feature set, especially on their email. Everything runs smoothly on my systems. I run Linux on everything and their web client has always been really clean and responsive. Their mobile client too. I use GrapheneOS and haven't noticed any issues with their email or VPN app so far.
  Made switching from Outlook & Gmail super easy. I don't miss those trash services at all, especially not Outlook lol.
  
  Outlook with Gmail is what I currently use. So, trying to move away from that.
- I use them for email. They're exactly like any regular email except with the potential for encryption.
  
  So real talk, what is the benefit to using proton over gmail? I am relatively well versed in the issues of Google and privacy, but im just wondering if there is anything more to it's benefit outside of the general privacy issues, which is obviously already a big draw away from Gmail.
- I used proton mail for a long time on a paid plan with a bunch of aliases, but dumped it eventually, now I just have a free email acct with them.
  I pay for their VPN.
  I dont use proton drive despite the cool name. 5gb isn't enough for me to care, and I dont care enough to pay for cloud storage at this point in my life.
- free plan is definitely not worth switching to;
  You short think of it as a primarily paid service with a free trial, not a "free, but with paid subscription for extra stuff" type of deal
  they even go as far as to attach an ad with a referral link to all of your outbound mail on the free tier (btw hiding the fact that this happens is kinda scummy but whatever; if you're curious, it's all the way at the bottom of the settings menu, and locked unless you pay up)
  also, it defaults to proton.me, but some large websites ~~including ph~~ don't accept these, protonmail.com addresses are a lot more reliable
- Give it a try and see. I'm currently looking at moving from them, I shifted everything google workspace to proton in Nov and my main issue has been with Drive the whole time. The email is ok, but as it's all encrypted the search is next to useless.
  
  What's your issue with Drive?
  Also, you can enable better search, it's just gonna take a while at first to download and decrypt your content in your browser to be able to search it

This is actually kind of huge. I use a variety of cloud storage providers but Proton are the only one I trust to not need Cryptomator!

I got this email too... And I'm already paying for Mail Plus so it doesn't apply to me

Niiiice. I use a free account for some backups of some files and this is definitely a huge plus.

Nice.

Raises the question how is proton paying for all this?
- idk, my $100/year for the email, 10 simultaneous vpns, and ~~510GB~~ now 520GB of storage.
  but there's probably other revenue sources other than my one annual plan 🤷

👍

I'd rather have more storage space with all paid plans and I want all proxy locations to also be P2P locations.

What happens when they reach the point of “enshittification”?
- They don't have shareholders to please and don't seem to be hungry for money right now.
  Once that changes, sure, they'll go downwards.
  Word of advice for you, if you have this attitude towards everything you won't enjoy anything in life anymore.
  
  It's why I pay for my proton mail. I don't want enshitification to occur.
  
  It’s a fair question these days but I probably deserve the kick back. 😀
- Company: Marginally improves free product tier
  You: "Well shit, this is the beginning of the end for those guys!"
- Then you should migrate to another service.
- I wish people stopped to throw that term around
  
  It's been giving me semantic satiation for a while now.
- Next time you see that comment box open up before typing something - think.