My grievances with Proton

I think Proton is getting singled out unfairly. A large grievance on here is the subscription lock-in due to losing additional Proton domain alias email addresses if you downgrade your mail plus or proton unlimited subscription. (Proton Pass and SimpleLogin actually let you keep using your aliases after your subscription ends).

Should you feel entitled to keep using additional pm.me or protonmail.com email domains after you subscription ends? Well, it depends on your perspective.

It might sound harsh given you could have kept using additional proton email addresses if you used them with free accounts from the start. Though, this is against Proton’s terms of service. Proton also makes it difficult to juggle multiple free accounts (their mobile clients for example only let you sign into one free account at a time).

But I think the main issue here is that for a lot of Proton users, this is their first experience with paying for email, which means they have different expectations.

If you were to go with another paid email provider, they would also restrict your ability to receive email to their domain after you cancel your subscription. The only ones that let you keep using it are the ones that offer a permanent free tier. This is why it’s recommended to purchase your own custom domain if you go that route to avoid vendor lock-in.

Proton is actually MORE accommodating than other paid providers because they have a free tier and will at least let you hold onto your main proton email address after you downgrade to the free tier. And as mentioned, you get to also hold onto your Proton Pass and SimpleLogin aliases. Further, Proton also doesn’t reuse email domains after you cancel a subscription or delete your account (from what I remember) whereas other email providers do. So there’s less of a concern that if you don’t keep paying, a bad actor could get full access to your former email domain and use it for nefarious purposes.

But for free email users, they never had to worry that they would lose access to their gmail, outlook, Yahoo, etc email address by not paying. Your gmail address felt like yours until Google was no more, which isn’t likely to happen any time soon. They could lose it because of other reasons (like terms of service breaches, inactivity policies, forgetting login credentials, etc), but it has otherwise not been a pressing concern for most users.

Like many complaints against Proton, a lot of grievances could be avoided by clearer communication to highlight product shortcomings. I don’t know if many people would bother with their additional pm.me etc aliases if they understood they would permanently lose them if they cancel their subscription. They might choose to instead purchase a custom domain and/or use Proton Pass/SimpleLogin aliases instead.