any competent opinions on protonvpn vs mullvad vpn?
Mullvad accepts my payment for a month of use at a time, and I manually renew it (after I receive a reminder) each month. If I don’t need a vpn the following month, I don’t pay for another month. I also find Mullvad works a bit better on Linux too.
I just got hit with a 2 year auto renewal charge from proton for my old proton account (email, storage, vpn) for roughly $200 with no email reminder. I thought I had cancelled the auto renewal, but I apparently hadn’t. When I went to cancel it after receiving the charge, the process was full of dark patterns and offers to continue my service, ending with the inability downgrade because it required me to manually delete emails for 30 minutes to free up storage to downgrade to the free account.
It feels like proton has shifted their focus to metrics and profit growth over user experience while Mullvad simply provides a great product with no trickery.
However, as soon as you downgrade the account yourself and cancel the subscription, we will automatically refund you for the unused time. The refund is automatically issued in the form of Proton credits which you can use for a Proton paid service in the future, or you can request the credits to be refunded back to your original payment method by contacting our support team: https://proton.me/support/contact.
> We cannot downgrade a subscription for you automatically, as only you can choose what data should be removed from your Proton account - it is impossible to downgrade the account to a Free subscription if it exceeds the limits of the Free subscription.
Add a button to delete all data in my account that appears when you tell me you can’t downgrade.
> The refund is automatically issued in the form of Proton credits which you can use for a Proton paid service in the future, or you can request the credits to be refunded back to your original payment method by contacting our support team
What is a proton credit? You chose to issue an unauthorized payment on my card in USD.
To summarize my experience, in order to cancel a subscription at the end of its period, one must:
- Set a reminder to cancel the subscription potentially years out because they cannot disable auto renew
Failing to cancel before being charged without a warning email, they must:
- Discover how to manually delete all of their files across various proton services to get their storage below a free tier threshold
- Email support to ask that their refund issued in proton credits be converted into their payment currency
- Respond to support’s email asking if they are sure they want a refund
Proton VPN is very questionable - sleuths have figured out that it's just a white-labeled version of NordVPN. But the trail is a rabbithole, and you might not be personally satisfied with the standard of evidence. Here is a start for you: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23571653
And since the link to [2] in what I linked above is broken, here is the archived version: https://archive.is/iZ2l2
The only piece of evidence in your linked comment is the now defunct blog post: https://web.archive.org/web/20200629163107/https://vpnscam.c...
In addition to reading like it was written by an angry 12 year old, it makes some enormous logical leaps. The facts given are that Proton has an official legal entity in Lithuania called PROTONVPN LT, UAB, and another company called Tesonet shared Lithuanian offices and apparently some business services with them. The article claims that Tesonet is a "data mining company" based on the following evidence:
> Tesonet has its hands in “Machine Learning Solution, cybersecurity, and collection of business intelligence data” in efforts to create algorithms, that best suit their client business needs. If you read their about page, the company openly states it employs many different technologies to structure data, which is run on various services like MySQL, Anisble, collectd, StatsD, ElasticSearch, Grafana, Influx DB, Python, and Couchbase.
> ALL of these names rely on HEAVY USER INFORMATION, which makes sense, considering that Tesonet is a DATA MINING company. Now, let us not forget that Lithuania itself is a NATO member that regularly holds NAZI marches.
Let's just say that I'm not immediately convinced that Tesonet is in the business of selling user data.
The article also claims that in one online Lithuanian business services directory, the CEO of Tesonet was listed as the head of PROTONVPN LT, UAB. I have no idea of the legitimacy of this claim, but it stretches plausibility to claim that Proton is secretly not a Swiss company and secretly has a Lithuanian data mining company CEO as its head.
The article then goes on to make some completely unsupported allegations: "the real question is not whether ProtonVPN is working with Tesonet, but if the provider is owned by the data mining company" and "Under the name of a FREE VPN service, they’ve been collecting USER DATA all along."
Furthermore, the original source of most of this information actually comes from a Hacker News comment. The article links to a comment by the head of Private Internet Access! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17258203
Unfortunately this gives the game away, because the comment is "retracted and removed by author's request". Dang comments:
> In addition to the redacting the above comment, we deleted several comments below by request of their authors. My understanding is that the dispute has been resolved and that the allegations are retracted.
In other words, it appears to me that the true source of these rumors has retracted them and no longer believes that Proton has the claimed ties to Tesonet.
Ironically, as a result of looking into this, I feel slightly more confident about ProtonVPN than I did previously.
Edited to add: you're also stretching even the blog post's unsupported allegations in your comment, when you say that ProtonVPN is "white-labeled" Nord. The article makes the unsupported insinuation that ProtonVPN and Nord are both owned by Tesonet, but this is different from the claim that ProtonVPN is just Nord repackaged as a different product, as you claim here.
I was nodding along, until this.
Seeing someone retract a pretty specific claim like that by calling on the admins to delete, instead of leaving it up for posterity and/or and discussing how they made the error, feels more like a legal threat was received, and some pants were shat.
Edit: To make this constructive, you could add why people think so and share a related link or something.