Proton is transitioning towards a non-profit structure

That's refreshing to see in a world of ever increasing enshittification. Wish more companies move in this direction.

Yeah, kinda makes you wonder as to why proton is adding A.I. features though.
- I think it might be because AI (aka LLMs) is genuinely useful when used properly.
  I use AI all the time to write emails. I give the LLM the email thread along with instructions like “I can’t make it Tuesday ask if they can do Wednesday at 2pm”
  The AI will write out an email that’s polite and relevant in context. Totally worth it.
  I think the problem is people/companies trying to shove LLMs where they don’t make sense.
- Non-profit doesn't mean that no one makes money. But it does mean they pay less taxes. If the C suite is full of funders, you can pay them in bonuses.
  https://www.charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages-of-1-million-or-more
- Maybe to keep pace with trends, and be able to put a check in that box amongst competitors

I'm happy to see this announcement. However, just transitioning to a non-profit does not make an organization good. They can still be greedy and take advantage of their user base. That being said, it seems Proton's mission statement resonates with a non-profit type structure. When you are accountable to the shareholders, they become the priority.

"don't let perfect get in the way of good" or whatever that saying is. One step at a time, yeah?
- "Perfect is the enemy of good."
  Bad, also, is the enemy of good...
  I think maybe good walked into the wrong damn neighborhood.
If I remember right, OpenAi started with this model too, and they do lots of shady stuff. Not that this is the plan for Proton, but I completely agree that simply creating a nonprofit that owns the for profit brand doesn't guarantee good behavior.
Yes Mozilla is a good example. They're run like any other Silicon Valley company and spend more in C-suite develop their damn product.
- Bad example. There are plenty of non-profit FOSS services that do well and serve the community.

This is what made me finally completely switch my email and docs to proton. I'm so close to being able to delete my google account now.

Well this and the docs live collaboration feature they recently added.

Switched mail and I'll switch VPN once my old sub expires.
I thought it'll take many more years until the acquired Standard Notes
Ya know, you may have just helped me finally make the full switch. Thank you
I wish it worked in the (iOS) app or had its own. A browser only experience isn't good enough for me to use it.

Cool. I switched to Tuta because it fits my use case better (2 domains, one for my personal email and one for everything else). I don't need any of the bells and whistles Proton has, and I also don't want to pay extra to get more domains. The Tuta app kinda sucks, but it gets the job done. I'm hoping my wife and kids will be interested in private email, but they don't seem to care, and I don't think they'd like the tradeoffs.

Now, if Proton revises their tiers, I might be interested. Give me something like the Tuta tiers, and I'll probably switch to it. I prefer the UX of Proton, but $10/month is a bit steep for me, especially since I'm not going to use the other stuff they're bundling in (I use Bitwarden for PW manager, have my own NAS, and I prefer Mullvad over Proton for VPN).

That said, it's super cool that they're going non-profit. When that's done, I'll give it another look.

They also have mail-only tier at 4.99.
- Yup, but only one custom domain. I really want at least two domains, one with tons of aliases for various accounts, and the other for personal communications. I could use a proton.me address for it, but then it becomes a huge pain to switch to another service should I need to.
- Does that include the IMAP bridge and multiple addresses?
Problem with Tuta for me is its too closed off.
Proton at least offers an IMAP bridge, Tuta utterly refuses to let you use your email outside their apps, which makes it more of a messaging app. And the fact there's no way to export everything easily or even forward messages rubs me the wrong way. I tried them and have been using them for about 2 years but I'd definitely love to get away from it.
I'm tired of these walled gardens. I don't give a damn how secure it is, if I can't leave it with my shit, then no thanks.
- Yeah, it's annoying, but I honestly don't use any email clients anyway. So whether I use the Tuta or Proton app/website is essentially the same for me.
  But you can export your email (select all then click "Download"), but unfortunately forwarding isn't a thing. That does put a bit of a wrinkle into my longer-term use of it, so if Proton can become price-competitive for my use-case (and no, I'm not paying $10/month for email), I'll probably switch. But since I can export them in some way, it's not a deal breaker.
You say you use Bitwarden. Is that self hosted by any chance? If so, how do you handle the potential for an outage or server failure, where you’d presumably need some of the passwords to fix the problem in the first place.
- The Bitwarden client has all the data cached, so the server can be down and you still get access to the passwords (same for internet connection).
- I also self host vault warden, it's pretty straight forward. Like the other person said, it caches locally.
- The local cache solves this problem mainly. Mine also replicates to one of my other servers occasionally.
- Mine isn't currently, but I'm working on it. The main complexity is that my wife and I share some passwords, and I want to make sure I do it properly so that transition is as smooth as possible. Vaultwarden is what you'd use to self-host.
  But as others have said, I'm really not worried about it. Passwords are cached locally and only touch the server when syncing to the server. I want to self-host to protect against breaches, not because I'm worried about connectivity loss.
  You can always backup your passwords (there's an export feature) if you're worried about it. I haven't done it, but I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to have a KeePass backup or something that you update manually every so often.
Are you me? Lol I feel the same about tuta, yet I such with them. I am waiting for my wife to care for her privacy and switch to a family bundle with tuta.
Got my own NAS and a Bit warden server for PW. I changed Mullvad over AirVPN once they stopped supporting port forwarding, though.
- Your response makes it sound like you're responding some kind of rage-rant. But from my reading, the post you responded to basically just lists a few things they like and dislike - clearly given as personal opinions. So your response reads as unprovoked hostility.
- ?
  I think Proton is a cool project, I'm just a little disappointed at their pricing tiers. It's probably fine for a lot of people, and hopefully becoming a non-profit encourages them to improve the value at each tier.
  I actually used to pay for Proton when I was consulting. I think it's a fantastic service, but now that it's not really a business expense, I find it's a little to expensive. So I have my business domain, my personal email domain, and a "junk email" domain all at Tuta, and I like that setup. But it's not worth $10/month for me, it's worth about $3-4/month, so I use Tuta. Privacy is really important to me, but price is also important, and Tuta checks both boxes.
  I know I'm an outlier, just giving my 2c that Proton is a good service, and I hope they adjust their pricing with their new non-profit model.
- Did you respond to the wrong message?
- what's with the hostility?
- I'm sorry I took this username before you got it. Clearly you deserve it more with posts like that.
- Wtf
- Touch grass.

This is definitely great news and refreshing to see from a company, but this came out two months ago.

Published on June 17, 2024

Good. Profit and privacy are mutually exclusive in this industry.

Proton is still a for-profit company and has shareholders who expect to to make money. The change is that the largest shareholder of the for-profit company is now a separate non-profit organization. It is still a positive move, but not entirely what the marketing makes it seem.
You mean record breaking profit and privacy. Edit: actually I bet drug cartels are probably do both, at least some (\s)
- I would imagine any privacy measures cartels take are seen as overhead more than anything else
That's roughly the opposite of what the article says.

Of course it is good news, and I'm an happy Proton customer since over an year, but this Proton blog post dates back 2 months now...

They just pushed an email announcement out, which is probably where OP heard about it.
And that makes it irrelevant because...? I'm a subscriber and I wasn't aware of this until this post...
They literally sent the email out within the last 36 hours. My work account got it this morning, and my personal last night.

Switched from gmail to Protonmail and Outlook to Tuta.io and love it! Companies that put privacy and the individual first.

How is spam filtering compared to gmail.
Afraid to switch as gmail spam filtering is excellent
- I've been using Protonmail as my primary address for a few years now. I'm yet to have a single spam email make it to my inbox. In comparison, I use my gmail less and I've had a few blatant crypto scams make it to my inbox.
  I'm not saying for certain that it's better than Gmail's, but that's my experience so far.
- I've been using proton for a few months now with a yearly Mail Plus subscription and I have yet to receive an actual spam e-mail. Your experience might be different than mine since I take precautions not to invite spam in the first place, but even then, Proton looks to be doing an excellent job
- Honestly I’ve not experienced any on either of them!

Good for them, I love being able to play Windows games on Linux.

They’re unrelated to Valve’s Proton
- To be honest that's what I thought the post was about until I read this, so thanks.

Just wanted to point out that it does not change anything from privacy and security perspective about their products.

Also they are still operating as a normal company internally (they still offer their vpn through a third party provider and they still work to achieve the highest income from their products).

I switched to Proton Mail in 2019, and recently started switching to their VPN service to use port forwarding. Glad to see Proton is putting their money where their mouth is.

I've been too critical of them in the early days and will admit that many of the issues that plagued their VPN service years ago have now been fixed.

Didn't they get shit recently for AI and crypto related decisions ? Did they backtrack on that ?

Even if they did, so what? We should not then recognise positive decisions?
If we don't allow companies and people to make any mistakes, for fear of being forever scorned, then we'll end up with either unprogressive risk averse companies that cannot compete against their peers, or a host of good companies that go bankrupt from the slightest misstep.
Personally I'm glad companies such as proton exist, and are prepared to take risks, as they are currently our best hope against the likes of Google and Meta.
They did not. This is another marketing play
- Do you understand what enshittification is? It's a slow descent over a long period. You add optional, privacy-respecting AI now, and over time, (like a decade,) it becomes more shitty until eventually all your data is opted in to centralized data harvesting or wherever.
  I'm an Unlimited paid Proton user, and these new trend worry me too. Enshittification is a slow process. I watched Google turn from "Do no evil" to what they are today, and I'm too tired to want to watch the same entire process happen again to Proton.

If so, will they re-think tiers? Or maybe they could give the option for users to choose what they need exactly and what they're willing to pay? (i.e current Proton plan that costs 8-12€ per month is too much for me, but I would gladly pay like 5€ monthly for little storage, VPN and few email aliases)

Edit: Proton has REMOVED the P2P tick from the VPN on this plan since I took the screenshots below. That sucks.
I would gladly pay like 5€ monthly for little storage, VPN and few email aliases)
Includes VPN with P2P and streaming, Drive with 15GB, Proton Pass, etc.
https://proton.me/mail/pricing#compare-plans
- I don't think this plan supports P2P. You're still on the free plan with the VPN.
  Edit: Looks like I was wrong. I remember needing to switch to a better plan to get the P2P but I guess I was wrong.
  Edit 2: There is some inconsistent information on the Proton site regarding what is included in each plan and this seems to be the source of our confusion in this thread.

Is this going to be the same kind of non-profit as OpenAI? With a mission to improve the world? Yeah, let's see how that goes. Another Proton marketing play on their set track to enshittification.

OpenAI is now for-profit since they got funded by Microsoft.

Then they should transition away from multi-level marketing pyramid Ponzi schemes too. I deleted my Protonmail account when Proton began peddling crypto“currencies”.

Them holding a reserve of a cryptocurrency in case something happens to their financial accounts is not the same as peddling crypto.
They're not trying to sell you any. They're not telling you that signing up to proton gets you "ProtonCoins" or something.
- It gives credence to greed incentivizing unethical contraptions.
What's wrong with splitting eggs in different baskets ?
- Immoral baskets that incentivize greed are to be avoided.

This is old news. Why are you posting this just now? I mean I don't really care much. I transitioned to Posteo as soon as I learned that they stored the private key. They don't even let you use your own GPG key, useless honeypot. Their recent bitcoin wallet supports this. If they cared about privacy, they wouldn't go with Bitcoin. They have been ignoring requests for monero since years.

They also are getting into the AI hype, so I can't trust my data with them.

You can use your own GPG key (https://proton.me/support/importing-openpgp-private-key or using the bridge), whatever tool does the signing needs the key (duh) so I am not sure what you mean by "they store your private key" (they stored it encrypted as per documentation https://proton.me/support/how-is-the-private-key-stored), their AI was specifically designed as local, exactly to be privacy friendly, plus is a feature that can be disabled (when it will reach general subscriptions).
I don't care about cyptocurrencies, but I suppose they started with the most popular, nothing to do with privacy as they just let you store your currencies.
Anyway, use what you like the most, of course, but yours don't look very solid motivations, quite a lot of incorrect information, I hope you didn't take your decision based on it.
- You upload your private key to the cloud. Encrypted or not, this is a bad idea. No thanks. I can do the signing locally and then I'll do the decryption with my own private key locally without them storing it as well.
  Edit: mixed public keys with private keys
This is old
"I know this. Why doesn't everyone else know this? They should be me, I'm the smartest man alive."
I really don't care much
proceeds to type an entire paragraph as to why you don't care