Here is how it works: 1. You pay for example for 2 years of access. 2. After a few months you decide to remove the auto renew and just use the remaining time of your subscription, your only option is to cancel your current subscription and lost access to any premium service you paid for, they give you credits for the remaining time of your subscription, that you can use if you contract other services.
So you are force to cancel the subscription before the renewal time and hope you don't forget to cancel it.
Run from this company.
I was a happily paying customer for years
One day, i decided to try out the business plan for my naescent startup for organic farming.
When i realized they were missing critical features (autofwd rules one i recall) i tried to go back to the regular paid account.
Not only i couldnt do it, but they forced me to delete emails by hand for years worth of pictures that i had saved in the account to get below the free plan quota. All because i needed to reestablish my personal account so i could move both custom domains to another provider.
then i got below the quota, it would still not allow me to reestablish the account.
To their credit, although their customer service take a while, they did help.
It makes me sad, and have a very bad taste in my mouth because I was really trying to give business to a google competitor.
EDIT: just like OP, I lost access to the existing paid plan when I upgraded. What really made me upset is that I couldnt restore access to my account by downgrading on my own, no matter what I tried. Took custom domains off account, still cannot downgrade...gave up freebie storage space , still cannot downgrade. Meet criteria to buy monthly plan. Cannot downgrade. Reduced feature use to meet free plan tier, still could not downgrade. Reduced storage used below free plan, could not go to free plan, either. All the while I lost access to all my accounts because I couldnt do 2FA challenge sent to my old proton free plan.
Needless to say, proton free plan is not tied to any mission critical access anymore.
At least here in the UK this works fine. Netflix, Spotify etc all deal with that properly when I've "cancelled" my service this way.
What's funny is how people won't use virtual cards because they think bill collectors or the law will come after them. That's extremely unlikely to happen for an unpaid $9.99 bill, especially since it's not like bill collectors work on behalf of companies free of charge. It's in the best interest of companies to ignore the transgression, freeze the account, and wait for the user to come back and reactivate it; much less likely to happen if they actively punish a user because they missed a payment.
Same goes for the "but muh credit score" argument. Somehow my credit score is still excellent despite the numerous times I cancelled virtual cards or didn't feel like paying my utility bills.
So yeah, use virtual cards everywhere.
Uh... really? That's the most anti-consumer thing you've ever seen? It may be anti-consumer, but that's nowhere near one of the worst. At least it's actually feasible and straight-forward to cancel with Proton, unlike certain big-name Silicon Valley firms; at least they aren't known for outright stealing your money, canceling your accounts at a whim, or refusing support. I don't like it, but they explicitly warn the user what's going to happen if they downgrade, and there's of course the refund you mentioned.
Having been a happy customer of Proton for many years, I wouldn't say "run" on that basis. It may be a deal breaker to some, but I've been happy enough with what I get that I find it a tradeoff worth tolerating.
:)
A calendar reminder to cancel the week before renewal is another option
1) Their mail import tool reports wrong email set count and sizes leading to low confidence the tool worked, in the end I mbsync'd from both fastmail and proton and compared the email set because the migration UX was so poor (this is reported by other users also).
2) Their alias address implementation is severely limited, on Fastmail I used *@domain to have infinite emails, on Proton you have to add every alias you want manually one by one, if you do not, you cannot reply from any address. This is not only limited in the UI, but everywhere, protonmail-bridge for example will reject sending any email that is not in your alias list, and as they limit it to 100 addresses you can't work around it programatically either.
3) Their bridge software is buggy, and poorly documented, it's better with the recent release but for a while it made heavy assumptions about your installation and would log you out sporadically, sometimes requiring gpg-agent to be restarted (for no reason I could figure out) before being able to re-auth.
4) Their Proton Drive offering is basically useless, it is not available on Linux so can't use it as a target for backup software like Kopia/restic etc, and desktop apps have been in development for as long as I can remember. The WebUI for it will break if you try and drop too many files at once. It has problems with file name limits which don't appear until you try and access the filesystem again; after uploading several documents with extremely long names I found they were straight up inaccessible on my phone or via the web, so as far as I can tell if I hadn't had a second backup I would have lost these files.
All this would have been rough, but acceptible for me if I felt their client attention / support was good, but the support I received was terrible. Multi-day back and forths with support agents who did not seem to understand my questions, where with fastmail I would have a technical response to almost any question within an hour.
Their uservoice page is full of basic requests that are unanswered after years: https://protonmail.uservoice.com/
I've never regretted migrating to a company as much as I do Proton and I would not recommend switching to their applications, everything feels half baked or limited by poor focus on reaching feature parity with other competing services. The fact I can't do basic catch-all domain with their email service without being forced to reply via a limited alias list (if I can, their support was incapable of telling me how), was my last straw.
It's a shame there's basically no other encrypted mail host that competes.
1. Currently, the EasySwitch doesn't support import from Fastmail, which may be why you experienced the issue. We would be interested to hear more details about tose issues, so please report them to us here: https://proton.me/support/contact.
2. We are not sure if you are aware but now Proton includes SimpleLogin too, which allows you to create an unlimited number of aliases and also user reverse aliases: https://simplelogin.io/. Here's how you can set up a SimpleLogin account with an existing Proton Mail account: https://proton.me/support/create-simplelogin-account-proton-....
3. We'll pass this feedback along to the Proton Mail Bridge team.
4. We can confirm that the Proton Drive Windows app is coming quite soon. Please report the issues you experienced with the web app to us: https://proton.me/support/contact.
Regarding support, note that the usual response times are 24 hours, but longer during the weekends when we work with a reduced capacity. We've been constantly hiring and training our agents in order to improve this. Additionally, if you have a particular example of a misunderstanding with the support team, we'd like to look into it and investigate.
While we may not been actively moderating our Uservoice channel, we do use it to inform our development decisions. Many of the recently shipped additions to the Proton Mail web and iOS apps have been decided on thanks to the feedback on Uservoice.
We understand the frustration with how the catch-all works right now. The team is aware of it and looking into ways to improve it in the future.
What about Tutanota?
I rest my case.
As a programmer, I've yet to have needed a password manager. My passwords are random word combos that are somewhat memorable and I have 2FA setup for most things. If I forget a password, I rely on the "forgot my password" flow, and just accept that as the occasional tradeoff for not having a password live anywhere specifically. For some sites that don't have 2FA, I rely solely on logging in via the "forgot my password" flow.
Far as I can tell, I haven't been pwned.
The biggest problem for me now would be the fact it cannot be self hosted, making lock in pretty extreme even though it's open source. The fact I can host my own instance is the main reason I stay with Bitwarden instead of migrating to an offline-first solution.
Is there some software I can install on my webserver to generate per service emails like Proton Pass here (amazon.44ot65@passmail.com, netflix.56ax12@passmail.com, ...)? And which forwards the mails to my main Gmail and allows replying to them.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29103056 https://encryp.ch/blog/disturbing-facts-about-protonmail/ https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17775326 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28057433
The fatal chink in the Proton model is that PGP keys must either be generated on the service or uploaded unencrypted?
To me it seems trivial to make it possible to upload a locally generated appropriately formatted encrypted key.
Glad if that now no longer true.
... and this is about the password manager ...
Rather than just guessing and assuming it'd be useful if you actually knew about the ecosystem before commenting.
edit: Their official announcement post says it's now open source, however I haven't been able to find the repository. I also still see no mentions of self hosting.
[* As far as I know, Bitwarden is an Electron app. It shares the same kind of sluggishness and some weird navigation issues that are common in Electron apps. Though I wouldn't go back to 1Password for various reasons, I recall that it's also an Electron app ever since Agilebits got huge funding for the company.]
[0] https://keepassxc.org/ [1] https://github.com/keepassxreboot/keepassxc
When looking at the extension's source code, telemetry data is anonymous, but it's always sent to the remote endpoint, and the only way to disable it is from your Proton account, not the extension itself.
-Proton's updated ToS does not change dispute resolution for users outside of the US.
-Proton's legal jurisdiction is Switzerland. Swiss law does not permit class action lawsuits.
-For US users, Proton's updated ToS also does not remove your existing right to bring a claim against Proton in Swiss court (so you are not forced into arbitration).
-Recognizing that some US users might not want to bring a claim in Switzerland, our updated ToS adds the possibility to arbitrate in the US.
-We are wary of US courts having jurisdiction over Proton as it gives the US govt leverage. We suspect many of you are too, which is why people care about Proton being Swiss. Therefore, while Proton agrees to permit arbitration in the US, we don't by default permit proceedings in US court.
So bad in fact that I couldn't consider using any of their products ever again out of fear.
