Proton

I started testing out alternatives immediately after discovering his post. I understand they're saying this was a mistake and was meant to have been posted from his official account and not the company account, but that is still a bit off putting to me. As others have mentioned, this also made me aware of how many eggs I have in this basket, and after trying out alternatives for a few days I made the full switch away from ProtonMail, Calendar and VPN to Tuta + Mullvad.

Unfortunately, my Unlimited plan renewed in November and customer service has stated they will not refund me for the remaining time, as 30 days has passed. Oh well, I can at least cancel my auto-renewal :)

I left and glad I did. It was a needed wake-up call. All-in-one is inherently risky. I'd rather support smaller, more focused products. If one doesn't fit my needs down the line, it's way easier to switch.

• Email: Tuta (meh, loading issues)
• Calendar: Tuta (don't like, can't handle recurring events)
• VPN: Mullvad (like)
• Drive: Tresorit (like)
• Passwords: already using Bitwarden (love)

I bought a year of unlimited in November but I have canceled and will be migrating when my year is up

What's the deal with Lavabit these days? Are they good? I don't keep up with things that well. Am old man.

No. I'm tired of making my life inconvenient the moment someone says something stupid.

Yes, I canceled my Ultimate account. Andy can believe whatever he wants in private, but publicly stepping outside of non-partisan policy advocacy at this exact moment in time was a red flag, doubly so because he espoused his personal politics through an official business account in his response to the Reddit thread.

Email/calendar went to Tuta, AirVPN for VPN, BitWarden for passwords. Everything is encouragingly smooth so far.

Fair warning: Tuta's email import is very new and only available on the more expensive tier at the moment (not sure if that's permanent). I didn't have any problems, but there were some issues a few weeks ago.

I do think people are over-reacting to Andy's words and assigning him political views he didn't express. He didn't endorse Trump or the Republican party at large, and definitely didn't "go full MAGA" or express Nazi sympathies. His statements about Democrats I partially agree with and partially disagree. His remarks about the priorities and actions of Republicans, though, were pure tailpipe-huffing fantasy. Being able to say these absurd things in public--under an official business account no less--shows poor judgement and implies he might believe other absurd things he isn't willing to say publicly.

Another factor in my decision: Proton's privacy policy specifies they can modify the policy at any time with no notification to users, and deems continued use of the services as agreement to the updated terms. The updated terms they didn't notify you about.

That being said, no service provider is perfect. I don't think Proton stores enough data to really be a concern if they turned over everything they have. But this whole thing is based on trust. Even with their clients being open-source software, you're trusting that they always serve the same browser scripts that they published. You trust that the password you provide at key generation or login isn't ever passed back to their servers. You trust that they don't keep unencrypted copies of your emails, files, or VPN activity. You trust that they aren't going to modify their privacy policy and quietly undo protections you thought you had.

The way Andy responded was enough to question my trust in the company with him at the helm. I didn't leave as a heavy rebuke, just as a "do better". There are plenty of other companies which provide equivalent services. That's the risk companies take when a major part of their market is ideological people: if you chafe their ideology they're more likely to put the effort into leaving.

I pulled the trigger and decided to leave. Not only because of the recent actions from Proton, but when I started looking for alternatives I quickly realized how deeply integrated I was into their eco system and how difficult it was to make the switch. That's personally not something I like. I guess this goes back to the saying, 'Don't put all your eggs in one basket'.

I'm now a happy customer of:

• Mullvad for VPN
• Bitwarden as password manager
• Fastmail for email
• Ente for photos
• Yet to decide on cloud storage for files.

I know fastmail isn't the perfect privacy option but works very well for me. They own all their own hardware and use encryption at rest. They help develop open standards such as Jmap to replace imap. . This, to me says a lot about the people behind the company and is something I appreciate.

For those looking for a more private email solution then Tuta is a great option too!

Best of luck out there folks 👍

I was hard considering it but if I do it then it would cost me way more.

Tuta ($3)+Simplelogin ($4)+Mullvad ($5) = $12

A proton unlimited plan costs $10. Also, when I was on a vpn plus plan, they upgraded me to unlimited so I'm only paying like $6.50 or something.

I am currently still using their stuff since my husband and I just purchased a longer subscription as a bulk purchase, but we will not be renewing and I am actively researching alternatives for the VPN and emails.

The emails is the more difficult part for me, because everyone suggests hosting your own on your own domain, but to me that just seems like a great way to have any site you tie your email to to be directly linked to your house. Unless I am massively misunderstanding how that would work, in which case any resources would be greatly appreciated.

I was looking into proton as an alternative to Google. I am no longer looking at them because of Andy's comments and doubling down. I feel like I'm giving enough companies with questionable ethics my information and money without giving it to them too. If the company wants to come to a consensus about making a public statement that separates them from his comments I'll consider those when they happen.

honesty seems like a overreaction, if proton's goals and actions don't change I'm fine with staying (even if I disagree with trump). it's one person on the board not the entire company as well. however I have considered leaving proton due to bad linux support and no de-googled notifications. afaia proton is the cheapest for what I use it for (vpn+mail+email aliasing+drive (barely using it due to no Linux client)), please tell me if I'm wrong. protonvpn has port fowarding support which I use to host servers sometimes.

I still like and trust Proton and won't be switching. They've built up enough good will. Hopefully they don't keep burning through it though. I'm still sour over the lack of feature parity, linux support, reliance on Google for notifications, etc.

I've left and canceled my paid subscription. Addy.io + Posteo. I like it way better.

Addy.io absolutely amazing.

No, I literally just moved to proton like 3 months prior to the comments and still in the process of moving my less used services to the new email from my Gmail. Not really willing to do it all again so soon. Maybe if something else happens which is more serious, but a single event is a bit much to make such a large decision in my opinion. If it's systemic and continues to happen then yes I will think about moving.

I highly-valued the cohesion and simplicity of having a suite of tools provided by a single vendor and all on a single bill, despite how often this turns into a vendor-lock-in strategy

Proton was part of my attempt to de-Google, precisely because it offered email (with custom CNAMEs), calendar, and storage, and because they open-sourced their clients and tools

Despite the UX and feature set being quite bare, I was okay with justifying this with the added privacy (which was a nice-to-have but not a deal-breaker for me)

It seems like all the alternatives are either less open-source, have even fewer features, are even less cohesive (indeed, I'd have to select entirely separate solutions and give up all integrations) or seem to have even fewer resources for development and project sustainability

No. Because changing email providers is a royal pain in the ass. Changed from Google to Ctemplar and from that to proton a year later after ctemplar went down.
I am not going to use smaller email providers because of that experience, and proton still seems to be the best of both worlds.
I absolutely hate that i am supporting a CEO like that with my money but I'm not in the mood to migrate anytime soon. Took me more than a whole weekend last time.

I am still with proton since the owners being pricks doesn't change the reasons why I like them for my email: They have made it clear what they will and won't give to authorities and I can act accordingly.

That said, I did look into going mullivad+tuta but decided against it. Since tuta requires you to use their desktop client if you want an "offline" copy of their emails and that just seems like a mess when they inevitably do something shitty and I need to wait for "support" to get back to me for why I can't download my emails and go elsewhere. Whereas I can just keep the bridge running and open thunderbird every week or two with proton.

I left and canceled my plan. No alternative yet as I was migrating from Google.

I downgraded from the Ultimate plan because I don't really need the VPN. It hasn't exactly achieved much because now I just have additional credit on my account.

If the CEO hasn't been replaced by the time my annual subscription comes up for renewal I'll migrate elsewhere. It's a pain because their email and calendar are half decent but I'm really not impressed with the company's failure to take responsibility.

I haven't left, but now it's something that's on the cards, which wasn't the case beforehand.

I only recently linked my domain to my ProtonMail account, so if I do switch it should be relatively painless given I'll transfer the domain too, and the original PM address has become more of a lost cause anyway due to spam.

No, I've not switched. While I disagree with his comments, that does not make me switch.

I am fine with using services provided by companies whose employees or leaders I don't 100% agree with all the time.

I also left my plan, even refunded the amount, since my renewal was set on January 1st.

Main reason I used Proton was their VPN, especially their wide range of servers and countries helped me. But now I don't need that many individual country servers anymore, so I settled to Mullvad, mainly because their prices are very competitive and they are considered "trusted" (even though I kinda miss port forwarding, I'd rather not have it, than trust in AirVPN or other smaller services).

I used their mail for a little while, so migration was rather simple. I currently test out Posteo, when I am happy with them, I might stick to them.

Same with Drive, I didn't use them, mainly because they do not have proper Linux support (no, rclone isn't sufficient).

Thankfully I didn't use them as my password manager (and definitely not as a crypto wallet service) :D