I’ll start off by saying everyone’s economic situations are just as varied as their threat models and how people make decisions on which services can be specific to themself and not one that can apply to anyone else. The services one chooses to use for free or to pay for may be based more on what they can afford vs what’s the best broad reaching plan.
That being said i’d like to see what others think about the proton suit of services. I’ve been eyeing it as an option for a paid service for a while but am hesitant to put all my eggs in one basket. I’m interested in a vpn, mullvad seems to be the other popular choice. I’m also interested in email address anonymizing service like anonaddy. At $5 for mullvad, $3 for anonaddy, and $3 for base proton email it comes out to a dollar more than protons premium tier which gets cheaper if you pay for 1 or 2 years at a time.
As said above would the biggest reason not to use proton for all of these separate services be not putting all your eggs in one basket?
I’ve been on the Proton premium plan for about a year and a half and love it.
I mostly use it for Email and the VPN, but I do use Proton drive for some random stuff.
I don’t use Proton Pass because I already use Bitwarden for all my PW management needs.
Email and calendar services have been pretty much flawless so far. I like the interface, the Proton mail bridge works well for desktop clients like Thunderbird if you want to use those. The apps work really well on my Android device, all of them, Calendar, Mail, and VPN.
My torrent box Proton VPN CLI app has been solid too.
By default just did a video (piped link) on this and I 100% agree with him. The killer feature is simplelogin. Being able to use a different alias email for every single account I use is absolutely amazing.
There are other such services such as addy.io but SimpleLogin is a lot better integrated IME. Addy for example can be quite janky; adding a big message up top of the email and such.
There’s also the fact that you only need to trust a single entity for email if you use SL + ProtonMail.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
I switched from Proton to Tutanota for two main reasons.
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I didn’t want to put all my eggs into one basket, just like you. With Tutanota I get email and calendar in one package. For VPN and online storage I use independent solutions (Mullvad, local solution via syncthing). Related to this, I don’t like paying for a bundle of programs when I only really want to use a subset.
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Proton isn’t following through all the way. They keep adding services (password manager and captchas recently), but they don’t provide the same experience across all devices. I’m on linux and their drive doesn’t offer a client that syncs my folder with essential documents. I have to manual upload. That’s a dealbreaker for me.
One reason for deciding on which service(s) to pay for is which service do you want sticking around. I can get a wireguard VPN from a number of providers. I like the way Mullvad does things and so I choose to get my VPN from them. One could make the same argument for email from Proton or groupware from Kolab.
WHY isn’t their email client on f-droid ? isn’t it opensource ?
F-droid doesn‘t accept the Proton Mail client due to integrated google notification framework. The APK however is available on protonapps.com.
Proton is currently rewritting the Android application completely.
It is available through the IzzyOnDroid repository if you want to download and update the app using an F-Droid client.
Agreed, that would be nice. At least they have a dedicated APK download site. https://protonapps.com/protonmail-android No self-updating though
