They’re just too expensive. Like, sure, it costs money to run, but 3.49€/month (the discounted 24 month rate) for the mail only plan, 15 GB storage. (41.88€, $45.17 USD, $67.28 AUD per year)
That’s really expensive if you just want mail.
The other stuff, is also really expensive. To the point that makes you think, “there is no way google is making THIS much to make up the difference in advertising to me for a comparable plan”.
remember, it’s not just about making up the difference per user in advertising, it’s about getting and keeping as many people into their ecosystem as possible.
then they make some cash from selling data, and having more data to scrape to train their models and such. proton isnt making any off your data
it’d be great to be able to easily compare cost and expense, but companies obscure so much in the backend. rental car companies buy discounted in bulk, then sell the cars tens of thousands of miles later at a profit, and that’s before any income from rental
If you just need an email account I’d suggest to have a look at posteo.de. I am with them for many years now. Price is good and terms also.
Switched to them in 2022 after a 2-year of proton precisely because the revised proton plans were weird and because id heard a lot of negative stories about getting locked out (from the proton side, not losing password). Ironically I almost just went thru the lockout process but thankfully the email support guy was able to get things sorted.
Tbh I miss nothing and since I use simple login or anonaddy for most misc things, switching was easy. My proton account is de facto dead…I wouldn’t refuse to return, but I’m really just an a la carte guy.
You get mailserver capabilities with that tier as well though. You shouldn’t be using the plus plan unless you need the email storage or host custom domains and don’t want to deal with the admin.
To be fair, it’s not as clear as it could be that there are other “plus” plans. If you happen to land on the proton mail page when looking, they only show you the mail plus option (and unlimited). And even then really truncate what exactly you get for each paid option. There’s a page that I was only able to find after opening my free account (it exists when not logged in, just never found it) that explains in depth all the options and differences.
Annoyingly, most of the individual upgrade pages don’t give the 2 year purchase option either.
