I have no qualms. I primarily use mail and VPN. I also use drive as a secondary backup of a handful of important things.
this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2024
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DeGoogle Yourself
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I think it's worth it.
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The simplelogin integration with protonmail is pretty cool, they even allow you to share PGP key with your proton email and simplelogin account so every forwarded mail is encrypted.
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The proton drive is pretty sweet, though, I haven't used much of it. I suspect I will be using more of it once there's a native Linux app, but, the web interface is still pretty fast and clean.
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Proton calendar works well and I use it a lot
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Protonvpn I use on all my devices with no problem, even at school which they try to block
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Protonmail, works as you would expect so not much to say about that.
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They genuinely care about the community and want to know your thoughts. The ceo himself stated something along the lines of the subscribers dictate which direction to take the company because there are no shareholders and there are no VCs.
My oldest email account is from late 2008 and I've used a grand total of 2.04GB. I say this just to demonstrate how much storage email really needs.
Proton Unlimited - $120/yr, comes with:
- 500 GB storage
- 15 email addresses
- 3 custom email domains
- VPN
- ProtonPass
Alternatives:
Email: Fastmail: $60/yr
- 50 GB of storage
- 600 aliases
- 100 domains
- Included static site web hosting
Storage:
- Wasabi: $7/TB/Mo and more flexible since it's S3 and there are tons of tools for S3.
Password manager:
- Bitwarden: $10/yr
The only one I have trouble with is VPN. A while back I would have said Mullvad but unfortunately they don't do port forwarding anymore so not so great for P2P.
Can you recommend wasabi storage personally?
I never heard of it and I've been shopping for a cloud backup.
Yeah, I use it personally.
It’s where my restic backup goes and I’ve had 0 issues.
I’m considering switching to B2 since I think it would be a little cheaper but I haven’t used that.
I don't know if fastmail is an appropriate comparison as it isn't e2ee and if you're getting proton unlimited, you're probably gonna go for the 2-year plan, which is cheaper, at $7.99/month ($95.88/year).
I had protonmail for a few years. Guess how many e2e encrypted emails I sent.
You can also get encryption in Fastmail by using something like Mailvelope.
At least proton doesn't have access to the emails. Also, I actually have used it. This one time this dr asked me to send medical stuff to their yahoo mail. I was like hell no let me send you the password to my encrypted email.
Oh, that isn't the encryption feature I was thinking of. You're talking about a password protected email, not E2EE, though that may technically be E2EE.
That's super shitty of your doc by the way, but you already know that.
I have used the password protected email feature before, once, in the few years I used Proton.
I've also sent password protected .zip files with 7-zip.
It just doesn't come up that often and there are other ways around it. And for E2EE, I have Mailvelope.
I have it, I use proton Drive for mainly photo backup from my phone. Mail for my email, and the VPN service.
Totally worth it for me, all their apps run well on my phone and their web interface for email is great.
Does the background upload works for you?
So far yeah. There was a bug a few months ago that prevented the background backup function from working reliably, but it's fixed now.
I’ve been eyeing Proton Family as a replacement to my 5TB Google One…
And what's your experience? Anything that you want to highlight?
You pay $25/month ($300 a year) for online storage?
Yeah there has to be better options if you're spending that much for home use.
You could get a 5 tb hdd for 130€ and a raspberry pi to run nextcloud for 70€ max
As much as I would like to suggest that, I wouldn't because this case would have no backups. I believe Google lost someone's google drive data once but that's extremely rare, that drive setup isn't too reliable, no raid, no backups, all this would probably cost much more than their 5tb subscription. Although, in the long term, it may be worth it.
I mean if you are able to spend 40€ more than the subscription you can have a second drive
I simply use Tailscale and a family members router / AP which take SDcards to have a backup of my onsite backup, off site.
And then use Mega + Proton drive for backing up the really important things so things are in three (four if you include my phones photo storage) separate places.
Never again am I falling to disks failing, and paying so much to the cloud peeps kinda irks me especially when they can just shut up shop like UbuntuOne did.
If you use all the services, sure.
I also think there is an argument to be made to just make separate accounts for each service instead of buying the bundle as its the best bang for your back.
I love mine, they improve the apps/services and add useful features frequently, they have a great customer support and all the features id expect for services like theirs are presented. Things id improve is speed for the mail client, upload speed for the drive (maybe impossible because of encryption) and better cross-service integration.
I agree, why put all your eggs in one basket? especially if the better alternative is cheaper.
If anything happens to your proton account, and you rely completely on their services, you could lose everything you have in your digital life, like 2fa codes, passwords, emails, photos and files, whatever else. Just like if someone in the google ecosystem lost their account, they'd lose their entire life almost. So it doesn't really make sense to me to pay more money, for a risk as big as that. I mean, convenience? they're all separate apps anyway. It's no different than using tuta mail, proton drive, bitwarden, and mullvad VPN. The icons are just different on your home screen.
I think it’s worth it. I use many of their services and they integrate nicely between each other and between different platforms. Plus, their customer service and tech support are excellent. I’m in the beta program and they’re always super responsive to bug reports and the like.
I was using Protonmail, and their other services, and was a paying customer for over a year. But I stopped because of their poor Linux support, and not being able to receive email notifications on my de-googled phone. I made a shift to mailbox.org and am liking it. Yes, I have to manage my own PGP keys, but the experience is much better, in my opinion. Their storage even supports WebDAV. I can encrypt the whole inbox and the files stored in their drive with my own key.
But I miss their VPN service, which was good, but still, poor Linux support is what I hated the most.
Its worth it even if its only for supporting them as there is no other way as of now.
I mean, you could also just self-host 🤷
Self hosting email is a huge PITA. That's one service you better pay for.
This guy who has been hosting his own email for 23 years and gave up agrees.
I mean, yeah, but first I need to learn to self-host.
Having a Rasp Pi 3/4 with Tailscale installed made it idiot proof for me.
Hell, I gave a spare pi to a family member which means I have off site storage and also get to VPN straight into their network to help them out (they technophobes and have no idea what's happening). If I can do it, you can.
Worth is subjective. It sounds to me like it's not a fit to your criteria so I wouldn't recommend it.
Personally, I like it. I actively use email, drive, calendar, and VPN. Yes, they're all separate apps so it's not like its a true ecosystem, but its really the closest to a suite of products you'll get in the privacy world. Mostly though, I like what the company stands for and how they treat their customers.
Biggest issue I have is their password manager. It's been improved since I've tried it but it wasn't great. The main issue I had was it sharing the same password as the rest of it's apps. No. I want a single password manager password I can remember and then a unique, complex password for apps. So I use a separate password manager.
I also don't use their aliases. I tried to switch over and just didn't like how it handled the headers and how it worked with my sieve filters. One day I'll probably make the switch, but it just doesn't seem worth the time when Addy is $1/mo.