My issue with them is that they make their lower tier plans too enticing. I've wanted to upgrade to pro for all the fancy gizmos but the basic mail plan is just too good a deal to upgrade.

For real. Why haven't I given them money yet?

I remember when Google offered "unlimited" for free.

I started with Hotmail back when it was 2 mb.

Great incentive, very clever move by Proton. All stuff that’s a good idea anyway but it’s just way too easy to “get around to all that later.” Then it’s 2034 already and Google still has you leashed tight.

I've been using their Unlimited plan for over a year. ~$8 a month for half a TB of cloud storage, automatic photo backup on mobile, fantastic web email and mobile email client, and a great VPN that allows for port forwarding and P2P-optimized servers.

Totally worth it for me. Great feature set, especially on their email. Everything runs smoothly on my systems. I run Linux on everything and their web client has always been really clean and responsive. Their mobile client too. I use GrapheneOS and haven't noticed any issues with their email or VPN app so far.

Made switching from Outlook & Gmail super easy. I don't miss those trash services at all, especially not Outlook lol.

I used proton mail for a long time on a paid plan with a bunch of aliases, but dumped it eventually, now I just have a free email acct with them.

I pay for their VPN.

I dont use proton drive despite the cool name. 5gb isn't enough for me to care, and I dont care enough to pay for cloud storage at this point in my life.

I use them for email. They're exactly like any regular email except with the potential for encryption.

free plan is definitely not worth switching to;

You short think of it as a primarily paid service with a free trial, not a "free, but with paid subscription for extra stuff" type of deal

they even go as far as to attach an ad with a referral link to all of your outbound mail on the free tier (btw hiding the fact that this happens is kinda scummy but whatever; if you're curious, it's all the way at the bottom of the settings menu, and locked unless you pay up)

also, it defaults to proton.me, but some large websites ~~including ph~~ don't accept these, protonmail.com addresses are a lot more reliable

Give it a try and see. I'm currently looking at moving from them, I shifted everything google workspace to proton in Nov and my main issue has been with Drive the whole time. The email is ok, but as it's all encrypted the search is next to useless.