- Proton, known for its secure email and productivity services, is transitioning to a nonprofit foundation model, ensuring it remains mission-focused without reliance on external subsidies.
- The Proton Foundation, now the primary shareholder, is located in Switzerland, which mandates that foundations act according to their established purpose, bolstering Proton’s commitment to privacy.
- Proton has expanded its offerings to include cloud storage, password management, calendars, and VPN services, all designed with end-to-end encryption and hosted in Switzerland, enhancing its privacy-first approach.
We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto “foundations”)," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. “Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core.”
The nice thing is proton has been slowly making more and more of its codebases open source, and has consistently done the right thing despite whatever winds of change come their way. I have had proton unlimited for about a year now and I am so glad. It was a great way to remove Google from my life but it didn’t require a particularly high level of technical knowledge. It’s a little clunky at times, but honestly it works very well.
I’ve had it for about 8 years. Those years were a treat. “oh hi! We just created another product which would make your life easier and more safe. We just added it to your prescription for free. Have a nice day!” I started with free email, I started paying when they introduced vpn. They just keep on delivering, year after year, they never disappointed me with any decision they made. I just wish there were more companies like proton: creating the best product they can, for the good of the customer and for society.