Proton: We're giving away over $1M to support a better internet
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Visionary accounts cost ~30 euro/month (assuming yearly subscription). That's currently more or less 30 USD/month and works out to 360 USD/year. Assuming those accounts get 60 years of use out of them that works out to 21600 USD in value/lost revenue. If you assume inflation of ~4% as a random number pulled out of my ass then that's 85k USD instead.
For 10 of those accounts that's 216k USD assuming no inflation and 850k USD assuming inflation.
So all in all that works out to closer to 360k USD in the naive case but more realistically it comes out to 1M USD flat with the inflation matched increase in service cost over that 60 year estimate.
Given this I don't think it's too terribly unfair to say that they are personally footing the bill. That's not to minimize the community's substantial contribution but the reward for this raffle realistically costs Proton as much to run long term as the raffle itself raises.
To be further pedantic, Visionary accounts are priced at ~30 euro/month. They likely cost Proton significantly less than that.
I would also suggest utilisation of those free accounts would be much lower than your estimates (though I appreciate I’m just countering your subjective opinion with one of my own).
And their cost is probably a decent bit lower than the sales price but given Visionary plans aren't sold directly any more to my knowledge, there's a chance the profit margin on those accounts dipped below a feasible amount and they've just kept the plan for existing users out of goodwill.
That all to say, those lifetime plans are definitely super expensive and probably make up a respectable amount of the raffle income but their exact cost to Proton themselves isn't exactly clear.
Sure if you discount by less, say 5% (due to e.g 5% yearly price increase) thst doubles to 72k, but it's still much much lower than your wrongly calculated 360k.
How much would you be willing to pay for that lifetime plan? Not 21k. Surely not.
Has any lifetime account for anything ever lasted for an actual lifetime? Short of the gold airline tickets that airlines have been weaseling out of recently?
It's a tech company. I'd charitably assume that "lifetime" means min(how long has the company been offering this service, 5 years (3 if company took VC funding)).
I think most lifetime accounts end up lasting an entire lifetime. It just happens to almost always be about the lifetime of the service, not the lifetime of a human.
I bought a raffle ticket just for fun last year. If I won, I’d use my account for the foreseeable future. But to say that this would have been “lost revenue” for them is a leap I don’t agree with. I am a user of their free plan. Them giving me a lifetime premium account does not make them lose revenue, when I currently don’t have any plans to buy a premium account and pay for that for 60 years.
And meanwhile, this raffle also works as a form of marketing. Who is to say that among all the other people there isn’t some number of people that will decide to start paying for premium due to the raffle reminding or informing them of premium accounts existing?
Since this is partially advertising on their part, I’ll do my part and throw in an endorsement for their VPN, drive, and mail services — I’ve got all my custom domains serving email via the latter, and it’s been a breeze. On top of the obvious security stuff, their UX is consistently top-notch; I much prefer their iOS app to the Google or Apple alternatives.
Well, no one seems to have a native linux client, but of they had one I would switch right now.
One thing UX wise (if you're looking Proton) I would like is the Calendar iOS app to reset the day to today everytime you open it. Really throws me off sometimes.
Also, for an Apple Watch Mail app :'}
Updated: For folks downvoting my comment - they are spending money for branding & selling better. Hence I asked this question.
I will say though, the mail service has been down twice in the last 2 months, and as a relatively new user, I've been less than impressed. I don't think I would use it for any commercial undertaking.
While the recent downtime did indeed affect my company, overall I've been really happy. Not being at the whim of Google's "oops we deleted your account" or "oops we've banned your account" has given me enough peace of mind that I wasn't too ruffled over the outages. Of course there would be a tipping point if the outages became a trend, but I am optimistic. My company also is fairly small in terms of mail volume, so that plays a part in the decision-making.
Overall I've been generally happy with the service, and utilizing the additional tools (pass, drive, vpn) has been great.
Probably shouldn't have posted a negative leaning comment for a topic that was positive, it just reminded me of the downtime.
FWIW I would recommend purchasing a subscription.
Even so, I encourage everyone to first try the free tier to see if they like it (ie the lack of caldav/carddav and how much you're tied to their own apps for the encryption, yes I known about the bridge, yes I also want a Linux client, or better yet, an api or rsync endpoint). Even the free versions have 0 ads and don't use your data, perfect to see what you're getting into. What a nice company, I happily pay them for a better internet indeed.
Well, the ten organizations working for a more open internet, who happened to be chosen by the Proton community, and who will together receive over $1 million in donations might disagree that publicity is the only upside here.
Can you expand on what bugs and quality issues you ran into? UI is pretty subjective (I find it fine), but in the 7+ years I've been using Proton Mail, I've never encountered a bug or thought the quality was poor.
Was it in the other products (which I admittedly don't make much, if any, use of)? Or were they bugs in Mail?