Nowadays they do provide an app (Import-Export) to export all your mail, even for free tier accounts, so it's quite easy to move away.
See: https://proton.me/support/export-emails-import-export-app
See: https://proton.me/support/export-emails-import-export-app
When I was using Protonmail in free tier, the Import-Export feature was only for the paid tier.
Seems strange that they only opened it for free tier now. This should be a feature available to any tier in the first place.
I actually don't have an issue with that. Once it is available to free tier users, it frees up the devs to go to the next item on the list once again only available to the paid users. Lather, rinse, repeat. Sounds like a fairly sound bizplan.
The obvious reason is that a company has an incentive to make it easy to onboard and no incentive to help you migrate off or even an incentive to make it difficult or costly to leave. I don't see how making import/export something only a payed tier has is specifically or especially for funding development. It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.
>It's not the deal breaker or the reason people choose Protonmail over others, even if it can be a consideration.
Yet here we are on a dev centric forum talking about it being a "bad" decision. From a dev perspective, the decision of starting something in a paid tier then (if ever) releasing to the free tier is not offensive to me. A company offers a free thing that has fewer features than a paid tier, "news at 11" type of story it is not. Doing poor research into the limitations of the free tier and complaining publicly about not having access to the paid features on the free tier is also not news worthy. Again, yet, here we are.
Here: https://github.com/ProtonMail/proton-bridge
Briefly looking at the files and code it's hard to tell whether that is still the case, but it's fair to assume Import-Export would reuse most of the machinery behind Bridge.