I've said this before but I've been waiting for almost five years now to switch to Protonmail personally - and with several clients, SMEs and startups.<p>Why haven't I done it?<p>Well, for one, to this day their pricing and feature structure is utterly unattractive, orders of magnitude more expensive than competitors (especially Gsuite/Google Workspace and Microsoft 365) and thoroughly confusing.<p>Some examples:<p>- Want to put your whole family on the "visionary plan" (~$350/year)? Tough luck, it's limited to 6 users, so your wife's parents are out.<p>- No multi-user support in tiers below "Professional", i.e. a family of 7 (incl. e.g. grandma) pays at least $560 per year.<p>- Work as a consultant, juggling several projects or startups? Tough luck, 2 custom domains and 5 measly aliases included only, even on the professional plan (~$90/user)! Also a mere 5 GB of storage. Google offered twice that 10 years ago and currently 3x - for free. Google's paid accounts include up to 2 TB (!) at that price point. As for the custom domains, on my private Gsuite I currently run about 10 without problem plus and at least fifty aliases (I make new ones for many services I sign up for, my #1 spam-avoidance trick). Even if I wanted, I couldn't switch without losing a ton of functionality, security and convenience. Getting most of this in Protonmail would probably cost me an eye-watering additional ~$360 - per user!<p>What on earth is their value proposition? Switzerland + encryption, okay, all well and good. Happy to pay <i>some</i> extra money for that. But not more than <i>10 times</i> the amount a user costs on Google Workspace.<p>They also have no discounts, let alone free accounts for EDU or NGOs which makes it hard <i>very</i> hard to convince any of these orgs to switch there seeing as they get a lot more value from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, completely for free - and these companies know that people will be more likely to privately sign up for Gmail, Office etc. if they use it at work or at school all day.<p>Bottom-line, I've longed for a service like Protonmail for almost half a decade now but at least the people and companies I work with don't want to pay close to what they're asking and are not willing to be nickel-and-dimed for something trivial like aliases, a catch-all address or a reasonable amount of storage (2 TB would cost ~$21,500 per year on Protonmail, according to their published price list!!).<p>From statements of their management I suspect that they're trying to manage (and limit) growth and thus have positioned their product in a way that makes it a premium/high-end offer, certainly without the goal of getting "everyone" to switch to them. The price and feature/addon policy makes it extremely difficult to convince anybody to switch for whom privacy and encryption is "nice to have" but not worth $$$.<p>I am a bit frustrated by this and have been for a long time.<p>Here's to hoping that a competitor appears and offers a more attractive bundle. Or that they finally get together a growth plan or funding that allows them to reduce costs and scale to more customers quickly.