view the rest of the comments
Proton
Empowering you to choose a better internet where privacy is the default. Protect yourself online with Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive. Proton Pass and SimpleLogin.
Proton Mail is the world's largest secure email provider. Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, private, and free.
Proton VPN is the world’s only open-source, publicly audited, unlimited and free VPN. Swiss-based, no-ads, and no-logs.
Proton Calendar is the world's first end-to-end encrypted calendar that allows you to keep your life private.
Proton Drive is a free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that allows you to securely backup and share your files. It's open source, publicly audited, and Swiss-based.
Proton Pass Proton Pass is a free and open-source password manager which brings a higher level of security with rigorous end-to-end encryption of all data (including usernames, URLs, notes, and more) and email alias support.
SimpleLogin lets you send and receive emails anonymously via easily-generated unique email aliases.
And for a damn good reason... Companies need money to operate. Proton may not be for profit like Google, but they are not a charity either.
Very little is free without strings, what's been normalized (in a bad way) is the concept that you can have free things that don't intrude asking for money. That only happens in the venture capital "get em hooked" stage (and we've seen a lot of it because the Internet is still relatively young). Even KDE is now asking for money (granted once a year ... but your usage of their desktop doesn't require them to run expensive servers).