Early access to Proton Drive is here | Hacker News Reader

Early access to Proton Drive is here

protonmail.com

I’ve been a very happy ProtonMail customer for a number of years now. My only complaint, like many other people, is the wait for these new products to be released. I’ve been using the new UI since it was released, however it’s still in beta (I can’t even remember what the old UI looks like at this point). I’ve tested their calendar which seems great, however still beta (with no mobile apps which make it fairly useless in my use case). I’m keen to try Drive too however I don’t want to get sucked into another tool that will likely be in beta for a long time to come.

I realise part of this is myself (and many others) being a bit too eager for them to release these products, however I do wish they’d focus their efforts on a single product and give it a short beta phase before full release as opposed to teasing various products that take forever to be released and not marked as beta.

Same here. I think it's a good idea to create an ecosystem around the Proton brand but not at the expense of its major products. Mail and VPN are pretty good on desktop for my usage but Contacts, Calendar, and now Drive are in alpha mode missing the things that would get a lot of user to do a proper switch from its competitors. I wished they'd focus more on a few produtcs at the time and not launch dozens of them with the bare minimum of features and no mobile apps.

To their defense they did release a lot of things to help create that ecosystem (SSO, bridge, mail v4 beta) but I think the drive launch should have happened after having Mail and Calendar out of beta with proper apps.

On the other hand, how long was GMail in beta? 10 years? And that's from a company with unlimited funds...

Was curious the cost and storage amount. Had to dig into the faq just to find out how much storage was involved.

getting pricing and storage for the offering took me at least 10 clicks. Honestly it turned me off from the product suite.

Probably because they’re not ready to commit... but that’s weird.

Btw I couldn’t find it, can you share here what you discovered? :)

I think Proton Mail is ok, but I wish they would focus more on email. I will probably just go back to gmail before the next billing. 3 years and I still dont feel the email part is good enough.

Consider switching to Fastmail rather than going back to Gmail! I switched from Gmail to Fastmail five or six years ago and have not missed anything.

Plus if you take advantage of this switch to get email at your own domain, switching providers in the future will be much easier.

I am a paying customer for ProtonMail, Fastmail, and Google Workplaces (renamed GSuite). I currently use Workplaces as my daily driver but keep evaluating the alternatives.

One thing that ProtonMail really needs is automatic detection of calendar events in emails and creation of calendar events. It is a real blocker to have to manually create calendar entries. When they release a new iOS app that supports their calendar, if they support automatic calendar entries then I will likely switch back.

The other big win with Workplaces is Cloud Search, which is also a big time saver, but I could reluctantly live without that.

> I wish they would focus more on email

I'm a fairly new user and I feel the same way. For me the product would be much better if they would put more effort in the email client itself and keep these addons in the background (development-wise).

Still, I like the fact that I'm paying for the product and that Google is not reading those emails.

I really like ProtonMail. I expect them to get bought and then inevitably ruined, though. But until then, I'm a happy user.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com