An Open Letter to Proton: Your bundle traps are recreating the exact Big Tech “single point of failure” we came here to escape.
I just emailed this directly to Proton’s Management and Billing teams tonight. Unsurprisingly, I immediately got hit with the standard automated ‘black-hole’ bot replies. While I know a human won’t see it until next week, I wanted to post this here now because, looking at recent threads, I know I am not the only paying user frustrated by this trap.
To the Proton Management and Billing Team,
I am writing to express my absolute disgust with the misleading marketing and anti-consumer pricing traps you are currently running on your paying user base.
Let me be brutally honest about why I am even a paying customer. Companies like Google offer a vastly superior, deeply integrated ecosystem (Email, Drive, Docs, Calendar) completely for free. The only reason I pay for Proton Mail Plus is for privacy and to escape the “single point of failure” trap that Big Tech creates. I have friends who were locked out of their Google accounts without explanation by an automated system, completely destroying their digital lives overnight because their email, files, photos and calendar were all held hostage by one provider.
I came to Proton to decentralize my digital life. But instead of respecting that, you are using forced bundling to try and trap me in the exact same walled garden.
When I tried to upgrade my current Mail Plus plan to get a usable VPN, I realized your rigid billing system physically prevents me from doing so. You do not allow a user to simply combine Mail Plus and VPN Plus on the same account. Instead, you artificially block that combination to force an upsell to the $7.99/mo Proton Unlimited tier. You are trying to force me to put my cloud storage, password manager and calendar under your roof just to get a VPN.
I do not want a 500 GB Proton Drive. I do not want Proton Pass. Putting every vital digital tool I own under a single Proton login is a massive security and accessibility liability, exactly like Google. Penalizing users for not wanting your “Unlimited” bundle is a fundamentally anti-privacy, anti-consumer practice.
Furthermore, the way you market the VPN included in my Mail Plus plan is completely deceptive. Your summary explicitly touts access to “2000+ VPN servers in 10 countries”. To any reasonable consumer, this implies you can actually choose between those 10 countries. Instead, I find out that it is just your randomly-assigned free tier, basically making the feature completely useless if I actually need to select a specific region. The way this is worded on your pricing page feels intentionally misleading.
Your much-praised privacy reputation is being dragged through the mud by these exact types of cheap shenanigans, forced bundling and shady upsell traps. You are acting exactly like the companies you claim to be an alternative to. A quick look at Reddit shows I am far from the only user who feels completely bait-and-switched by this.
As it stands, your pricing structure actually incentivizes me to keep my cheap Mail Plus plan and go give my money to a standalone competitor, where I can get a faster, better VPN without being forced into an ecosystem trap.
More than that, this entire experience has made me think twice before I even renew my current Mail Plus subscription. If you are going to use deceptive marketing and forced bundles to squeeze your users, that destroys the very trust that justifies paying you in the first place.
Stop hiding behind misleading marketing and stop using bundle traps to squeeze your users into pricier plans. Let us pay for the specific tools we actually want to use and we will reward you with loyalty.
Sincerely,
A frustrated Mail Plus subscriber