Proton is giving $150,000, the rest is from the people buying raffle tickets.
To be pedantic they are giving away $150k of their own cash but they also provided 10 lifetime accounts which are visionary accounts that you never have to pay for.
Visionary accounts cost ~30 euro/month (assuming yearly subscription). That's currently more or less 30 USD/month and works out to 360 USD/year. Assuming those accounts get 60 years of use out of them that works out to 21600 USD in value/lost revenue. If you assume inflation of ~4% as a random number pulled out of my ass then that's 85k USD instead.
For 10 of those accounts that's 216k USD assuming no inflation and 850k USD assuming inflation.
So all in all that works out to closer to 360k USD in the naive case but more realistically it comes out to 1M USD flat with the inflation matched increase in service cost over that 60 year estimate.
Given this I don't think it's too terribly unfair to say that they are personally footing the bill. That's not to minimize the community's substantial contribution but the reward for this raffle realistically costs Proton as much to run long term as the raffle itself raises.
> Visionary accounts cost ~30 euro/month (assuming yearly subscription).
To be further pedantic, Visionary accounts are priced at ~30 euro/month. They likely cost Proton significantly less than that.
I would also suggest utilisation of those free accounts would be much lower than your estimates (though I appreciate I’m just countering your subjective opinion with one of my own).
Oh 100%. It's not a for sure thing but at the same time I know those plans also historically have been auctioned for a lot of money and as a result the people who end up with them tend to use them quite extensively.
And their cost is probably a decent bit lower than the sales price but given Visionary plans aren't sold directly any more to my knowledge, there's a chance the profit margin on those accounts dipped below a feasible amount and they've just kept the plan for existing users out of goodwill.
That all to say, those lifetime plans are definitely super expensive and probably make up a respectable amount of the raffle income but their exact cost to Proton themselves isn't exactly clear.
It's not pedantic at all. They cost so much less that it renders the entire calculation meaningless. Almost all of the cost of a consumer VPN account is user acquisition (a cost they don't bear in this case). Operations cost peanuts - maybe $1/mo, if that.
No, inflation doesn't increase the present value. If anything, the proper way is to discount the future (potential) costs by say 5-10% per year, as the business may not exist forever etc. The net present value of an annuity of 360 dollars with 10% discounting rate is 360/0.1=3.6k. So for ten accounts 36k.
Sure if you discount by less, say 5% (due to e.g 5% yearly price increase) thst doubles to 72k, but it's still much much lower than your wrongly calculated 360k.
How much would you be willing to pay for that lifetime plan? Not 21k. Surely not.
> Assuming those accounts get 60 years of use out of them that works out to 21600 USD in value/lost revenue.
Has any lifetime account for anything ever lasted for an actual lifetime? Short of the gold airline tickets that airlines have been weaseling out of recently?
It's a tech company. I'd charitably assume that "lifetime" means min(how long has the company been offering this service, 5 years (3 if company took VC funding)).
> Has any lifetime account for anything ever lasted for an actual lifetime? Short of the gold airline tickets that airlines have been weaseling out of recently?
I think most lifetime accounts end up lasting an entire lifetime. It just happens to almost always be about the lifetime of the service, not the lifetime of a human.
People die all the time, so, yes.
I’ve had a lifetime subscription to 2600 Magazine for well over 25 years and I paid $260 for it.
To continue the pedantic … $260 invested 25 years ago for 2600 magazine would be ironically worth around $2600 today.
> Assuming those accounts get 60 years of use out of them that works out to 21600 USD in value/lost revenue. If you assume inflation of ~4% as a random number pulled out of my ass then that's 85k USD instead.
I bought a raffle ticket just for fun last year. If I won, I’d use my account for the foreseeable future. But to say that this would have been “lost revenue” for them is a leap I don’t agree with. I am a user of their free plan. Them giving me a lifetime premium account does not make them lose revenue, when I currently don’t have any plans to buy a premium account and pay for that for 60 years.
And meanwhile, this raffle also works as a form of marketing. Who is to say that among all the other people there isn’t some number of people that will decide to start paying for premium due to the raffle reminding or informing them of premium accounts existing?
Yeah it's definitely marketing and users who win definitely aren't guaranteed to have been paying users anyways however lifetime proton plans historically have auctioned for tens of thousands of dollars and presumably whoever ends up owning those auctioned off plans intend on getting their money's worth out of them. So it's no guarantee of lost revenue but I'd be willing to bet the bulk of those plans get some heavy use.
I joined the Raffle, seemed like a fun way to donate to good causes.
I was off by one digit... at least it went to a good cause
the recipients: https://proton.me/blog/2024-lifetime-account-charity-fundrai...
I wish they would spend a few euros on Proton Drive Linux client. Or at least help to enable third party integrations.
Oh for sure, I have a family account, so that is 3 TB, more than enough for all our important personal stuff. Would be so nice to be able to sync my ZFS pool there for an off-site/cloud backup.
Proton free email comes with storage of 1GB. I wonder why aren’t they beating Gmail (15 GB)? If they make 20 or 25GB wouldn’t they get more customers?
Updated: For folks downvoting my comment - they are spending money for branding & selling better. Hence I asked this question.
I believe their business model is different. Since Proton doesn't mine data, extra space is just cost to them. But for Google basically all data is useful in some way so they maybe even profiting from free accounts. This is not the case for Proton probably.
They don't use your data in email. It's also a loss for Google - just one that's easier to afford.
How do we know? Especially for trainning LLMs it's a goldmine now.
That would attract people who want to use a lot of storage without spending any money, i.e. the opposite of what they want.
True, but it will pull more customers from GMail. End of the day we are valuable as a company when we have more active users. But the earlier comment about privacy & less data makes sense. In a nutshell, we are giving away more data to Google instead of fees. data = money. Makes sense.
We can all try make good content and share it but how would it be discovered?
The raffle was fun!
I will say though, the mail service has been down twice in the last 2 months, and as a relatively new user, I've been less than impressed. I don't think I would use it for any commercial undertaking.
I've been with them from pretty much the start, and would say that two outages in the a few months is pretty uncharacteristic.
While the recent downtime did indeed affect my company, overall I've been really happy. Not being at the whim of Google's "oops we deleted your account" or "oops we've banned your account" has given me enough peace of mind that I wasn't too ruffled over the outages. Of course there would be a tipping point if the outages became a trend, but I am optimistic. My company also is fairly small in terms of mail volume, so that plays a part in the decision-making.
Gotcha! I appreciate the perspective from a commercial user and it seems like the downtime was fine for your use case.
Overall I've been generally happy with the service, and utilizing the additional tools (pass, drive, vpn) has been great.
Probably shouldn't have posted a negative leaning comment for a topic that was positive, it just reminded me of the downtime.
FWIW I would recommend purchasing a subscription.
I use proton. Love the product. I'm glad they are donating to organizations that need it.
This is crazy to me. I've subscribed to Proton to replace Google Suite. It lasted 3 days and I switched to FastMail. Their stuff is full of bugs, confusing UI, poor quality. I don't understand how you can give away any amount of money when that is the case. The only upside here is good publicity.. but what's gonna happen when people actually subscribe and see how the apps behave? Bonkers.
To add some balance, I use them for my business and my family (3 domains, 6 users) and find it works perfectly. Even my father is happy after switching because the UI is much more consistent across his devices than all the various mail clients he used before (Apple mail, iOS mail, provider's crap webmail)!
Even so, I encourage everyone to first try the free tier to see if they like it (ie the lack of caldav/carddav and how much you're tied to their own apps for the encryption, yes I known about the bridge, yes I also want a Linux client, or better yet, an api or rsync endpoint). Even the free versions have 0 ads and don't use your data, perfect to see what you're getting into. What a nice company, I happily pay them for a better internet indeed.
> The only upside here is good publicity
Well, the ten organizations working for a more open internet, who happened to be chosen by the Proton community, and who will together receive over $1 million in donations might disagree that publicity is the only upside here.
The only upside for Proton
>Their stuff is full of bugs, confusing UI, poor quality.
Can you expand on what bugs and quality issues you ran into? UI is pretty subjective (I find it fine), but in the 7+ years I've been using Proton Mail, I've never encountered a bug or thought the quality was poor.
Was it in the other products (which I admittedly don't make much, if any, use of)? Or were they bugs in Mail?
Love Proton, good shit! This is the kind of practically-minded activism that builds a foundation for more bold steps.
Since this is partially advertising on their part, I’ll do my part and throw in an endorsement for their VPN, drive, and mail services — I’ve got all my custom domains serving email via the latter, and it’s been a breeze. On top of the obvious security stuff, their UX is consistently top-notch; I much prefer their iOS app to the Google or Apple alternatives.
I would switch if they had a native linux client for the drive.
Well, no one seems to have a native linux client, but of they had one I would switch right now.
Def digging it!
One thing UX wise (if you're looking Proton) I would like is the Calendar iOS app to reset the day to today everytime you open it. Really throws me off sometimes.
Also, for an Apple Watch Mail app :'}
Nice! Are you gonna do it again in the future?
They do the Lifetime Account Charity Fundraiser every year.
Is proton 100% usable with a noscript/basic (x)html browser?
For cases like this, it's better to install the "protonmail bridge" application and use whichever local mail client you like. I have Thunderbird and a local Postfix relay aimed at my bridge and it works very well and certainly doesn't need javascript.
Definitely not, you cannot have E2E encryption without it
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]