I was a Google user for a long time. Mail, calendar, docs, the phone, all of it, fully committed. And I want to be fair about the thing I left: Gmail is a very good email client. Google Docs is still hard to beat at what it actually does. I did not switch because I found better software.
I switched because I got tired of the attitude.
Free has a price, you just don't get an itemised receipt
The problem with a free product is never the price. It's that the money has to come from somewhere, and where it comes from decides what the software is allowed to want.
A company whose revenue depends on knowing things about you will, eventually, build features that know things about you. Not out of malice. Out of arithmetic. Every reassuring sentence in a privacy policy is sitting on top of a P&L that needs the opposite to be true, and over enough years the P&L wins every argument it's in.
Google documented that trajectory themselves, by accident. "Don't be evil" opened their code of conduct for years. In 2018 it was quietly demoted to the final line of the document, which is where you file a sentence you would rather not be held to any more. Officially the motto was retired. Watching what the company has shipped since, the more accurate description is that it was edited, and the edit was the deletion of the first word. That leaves "Be evil", which is not a joke I enjoy making about software I used every day for years.
The old line is exactly right, and it has been repeated so often that it no longer registers as a description of anything: if you are not paying for the product, you are the product. Not a customer being given something for free. Inventory.
So I started paying. I'm on Proton Unlimited, and the invoice is the feature. When the money comes from me, I know what the product is, because it's the thing I'm being billed for. That's not an ideology. It's just a much shorter causal chain between "what do they want" and "what will they build".
There's a structural version of the same argument: Proton sits under a Swiss non-profit foundation, which is a real hedge against the usual trajectory where a principled company gets acquired and the principles turn out to have been a growth strategy. A hedge, not a guarantee. Nothing is a guarantee.
The hard part was never one app
Privacy alternatives for a single thing are easy. Signal for messages, a local password manager, a VPN you picked off a review site. I'd tried that route and it doesn't hold, because Google's grip was never one product. It was that everything lived in one place and worked together, and unpicking one thread left the other nine attached.
What made Proton Unlimited work for me is that it's the whole shape, not a corner of it. Mail, with my own domains. Calendar, where the event titles are encrypted and not just the connection to the server. Drive for files. Docs when I need an actual document. Pass for passwords and passkeys. VPN for the traffic underneath all of it. One subscription, one account, one company to evaluate instead of six.
Pass also hands out email aliases, which I now use for everything: one address per service, never reused. It's sold as spam reduction and that undersells it, because what it really gives you is attribution. When an address I gave to exactly one shop starts receiving crypto garbage in three languages, there is no mystery about who leaked me, and revoking it closes the incident in about four seconds. As a bonus your email address stops being the global primary key that every company on earth can join their database against.
It is not a feature-for-feature match with what I left, and I want to be straight about that. Some of it is a little rougher. Search across an encrypted mailbox is a genuinely harder engineering problem than search across a plaintext one, and you can feel that. The trade was worth it to me. It might not be for everyone, and anyone who tells you the migration is free is selling something.
Claims you can check
Here's the part that matters most to me as an engineer, and it's the part marketing is worst at explaining.
"We take your privacy seriously" is not a technical statement. It cannot be verified, and it cannot be falsified. What can be checked is whether the client is open source, whether the encryption happens before the data leaves your machine, and whether independent auditors have been let in and allowed to publish. Proton does all three, and publishes the audits, including the parts that were unflattering.
That's the real product. Not "trust us", but "here is the code, here is where the keys are, here is what we could hand over if compelled, here is what we couldn't."
The other half of that is the exit. Bridge gives you IMAP and SMTP, so my mail works with normal mail clients and my archive is portable. Calendars and contacts export in standard formats. I can leave. A company that makes leaving easy is making a costly signal about how it plans to keep you, and it's the single best predictor I know of how a company will behave in five years.
About the threat model
Security and privacy are at the top of how I choose software. Not as a hobby interest or a thing I enjoy arguing about online, but as the first question I ask about anything I'm going to trust with my life's contents. So I want to be precise rather than dramatic about why.
It isn't that I have secrets. It's that "I have nothing to hide" is a claim about today, evaluated against today's laws, today's government, and today's owner of the company holding your data. All three of those change. Data is permanent and the context it'll be read in is not. The only part of that you get to control is how much of it exists.
Consistency matters here too, including when it's inconvenient. Proton has had its own moment: in 2021 it was legally compelled by Swiss authorities to log IP addresses for a specific account, complied, and then quietly adjusted the marketing copy that had implied otherwise. That's worth knowing. A jurisdiction is not a force field, and a provider that will be honest about its limits is worth more than one that promises there aren't any. I ended up more comfortable, not less, because the limits are findable.
The thing that's still missing: notes
Proton does have Docs, and Docs is a word processor. You open a document, work on it, close it. That is a genuinely different shape from notes, which are a hundred small things captured quickly and found later by searching for a half-remembered word. A tool built for one is clumsy at the other. Reaching for a word processor to write down a thought is like opening an IDE to rename a file.
So the hole is still there. Mail, calendar, drive, passwords, VPN, documents, and then nothing built for the place where you actually think.
It's the piece I'd most like them to build, and the one where encryption is worth the most. Notes are where the unfinished thinking goes: the half-formed idea, the thing you're not sure about yet, the sentence you would not say out loud in its current state. That material is more revealing than the polished documents it eventually turns into, and right now it's the least protected thing I own.
So, a fan post
Reading this back, I've spent a good part of it on the one thing that doesn't exist yet, which is a strange way to express enthusiasm.
But that's what it is. I moved my whole digital life onto this company's software on purpose, I pay for it on purpose, and the only complaints I have left are about the parts they haven't built. For a company I left Google to get away from the attitude of, that's about the highest compliment available.