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 was in te same situation as you . I had anonaddy (addy) , Bitwarden, Mullvad , and was using google drive for stuff I don’t care about privacy. The thing is that
- Bitwarden : has more development than proton pass , but pass is great anyway and has all my needs even 2fa.
- addy: has plenty of free things enough for me but started to find most of their domains are blocked to register a user. SimpleLogin from proton feels more developed and works flawesly with proton pass
- Mullvad: is an execelent vpn , very simple , fast , cheap , but it has very few locations and mine particular one was missing, also it doesn’t have port forwarding . All these thins proton vpn have it.
- cloud drive: I really needed something to store more sensitive data, proton drive now have a desktop client so it is perfect por my needs. If you sum all the services it will be like 8 or 9 dollars I think , and the benefits of the proton services integrations I think $13 is a win.
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.
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I think they are unnecessarily expensive for email. I would rather go with tutanota. I don’t like having all my eggs in one basket. Calendar/email/contacts in one provider and VPN service in another is the way to go, in my opinion.
