Proton's mission, funding sources, independence, and community are some of the reasons we're more resilient than other privacy-first companies.

cross-posted from: https://programming.dev/post/10063199

Proton’s mission, funding sources, independence, and community are some of the reasons we’re more resilient than other privacy-first companies.

  • LWD
    461·
    8 months ago

    Two things stand out:

    • Proton is not a charity, which means purchases are simply purchases and not donations (which IMO is fine).
    • It’s not a venture capitalist funded firm.

    It’s that last one that means a lot, because even though [capitalism evil], venture capitalists take the cake for exploiting users and companies. As Skiff showed us, with Venture Capital, not only are you the product, but the company itself can be the product that gets sold to somebody else.

    • rdyoung
      101·
      8 months ago

      I’ve been using Proton for a few years now. I’m slowly moving everything over to them and when they offered the visionary plan again last year I jumped on it despite right now it only being my wife and I using it with a 3rd account as a family email.

      • LWD
        33·
        8 months ago

        Unfortunately, I find the concept of giving Proton any money difficult because of the way it treats people who pay them. They accept money immediately, like a prepaid service, but if you fail to cancel the plan before they attempt to bill you again, they will lock you out until you give them the same amount as the previous pay period.

        I had made the mistake of attaching my (free) Proton Mail and (paid) Proton VPN to a disposable debit card, so when the card ran out, I was locked out of my (free) Email until I had coughed up another $6 or so.

        That wasn’t so bad, but apparently people who sign up for yearly plans also have to pay for a year of service they don’t want to use if this happens to them.

        With that in mind, I would strongly advise people to think twice about giving money to Proton, and if they do, to segregate their services and never purchase all of them on the same account.

      • helenslunch
        24·
        8 months ago

        when they offered the visionary plan again last year I jumped on it

        I learned my lesson from Plex about lifetime subscriptions…

        • Possibly linuxEnglish
          20·
          8 months ago

          The problem is proprietary software. For instance, when simple mobile tools was taken over the community forked it and it was all good.

    • Possibly linuxEnglish
      711·
      8 months ago

      If there is one thing I can count on, its that Lemmy is constantly going to be full of “capitalism bad” comments.

      Honestly the best answer is to use software that can be self hosted. That’s hard to do with email but you should make sure you can migrate away from a service if you decide that it no longer suites you. We live in a free market so you can decide what email service you use.

      • LWD
        20·
        8 months ago

        These days, it’s unfortunately more or less technologically impossible to convince other email providers that your email provider is legitimate. Blame the prevalence of spam.