My grievances with Proton

win11.shading291: > there is unfortunately no good exit strategy with aliases. > > Either you use Proton, addy, duckduckgo, you’re essentially locked-in. I feel this is an issue with aliases in general, and not with Proton in this case. ThePrivacyDad: > I see a lot of advice to use email aliases in privacy tools overviews, but not a lot of thought has yet gone into what happens if you can no longer pay for the service - how do you backtrack and ‘undo’ all those logins? I’m guessing the only way in OP’s case is to pay for an extra month and change account user names one service at a time. Free unlimited alias providers exist (e.g., Duck). However, there is unfortunately no seamless, easy way to switch from one alias provider to another. You have to replace each alias from each account manually, and it is a tedious, long process. I know this from personal experience. I’ve been using aliases for years, long before Proton Pass or Simple Login existed. The provider I used allows unlimited aliases in the free tier. But when Proton Pass launched, I wanted to switch. I have over 600 aliases with my old alias provider. It’s been over 2 years, and I have yet to replace even a third of them with Proton Pass aliases. I’m lucky that my old provider is free. But if I was paying for it, I would definitely have had to make a more pragmatic plan. I’m not convinced that there will ever be an easy way to replace one alias provider for another. If you are paying for one, and you can’t afford it anymore, you will have to plan in advance and get to work on switching to a free provider. But if you have a lot of aliases (100+), you may need more than a month. This is also why I have never upgraded to Proton Unlimited. Every year I’m offered a discount for my first year, which I could probably afford, but precisely because I am not confident I could afford it at full price the year after, I don’t take the offer.