Proton Review: Frustrating Experience and Data Lock-in
I want to share my negative experience with Proton’s paid services. While I initially liked their free offerings, upgrading to Proton Unlimited turned into a nightmare.
**The Good:**
* **Proton Pass:** A great password manager, constantly improving.
* **Proton VPN:** Solid and reliable VPN service, worth the price.
**The Not-So-Good:**
* **Proton Drive:** Basic functionality is fine, but photo management is terrible. More on that later.
* **Proton Calendar:** Lacks essential features for power users.
**The Ugly:**
* **Account Cancellation and Data Access:** This is where things get really bad. When I decided not to renew my subscription, Proton completely locked me out of my account after 30 days – including access to Proton Pass, which stores all my 2FA codes and Passwords. They demanded payment for the next billing cycle with no option to downgrade or cancel. I had to subscribe to Proton Drive+(as a loophole, mind you) just to regain limited access and delete my excess data. Why is this bad(and why i’m not just a whiny client asking for freebies): you can only subscribe to unlimited in anual cycles where i’m located. You see the catch?
* **Data Export Nightmare:** Exporting data, especially photos from Proton Drive, is incredibly difficult. There’s no bulk export option, and their suggested solution of manually selecting thousands of files is ridiculous. Thankfully, third-party tools like rSync can help, but Proton doesn’t officially support them. My 80GB of photos are essentially stuck in Proton Drive with no easy way to get them out until they add a bulk download feature to get my 80GB of data out of there. Those are Photos synced via the Android app, mind you.
**Conclusion:**
Proton’s aggressive account lock-in tactics and lack of data portability are unacceptable. They essentially hold your data hostage unless you continue paying. While some of their products are decent, the overall experience left me extremely frustrated. I strongly advise against using Proton’s paid services unless you’re comfortable with the risk of losing access to your data if you decide to move on to another service. Support has proven itself incapable of handling this issue, which you’d expect to be one that already had a process to go through, right? AITA for thinking i should’ve been treated better? I would never had subscribed if i knew this is how they’d handle a downgrade.
OP: From your post it seems at least some of your assets on the paid plan exceed the limits of the free plan, so you needed to make arrangements to export the excess before you downgraded or turned off auto-renew. This policy is not unique to Proton, and not all companies have the same latitude to comp oversights, so it can definitely be a shocking lesson the first time you encounter this.
Some of the comments are making sense. If you downgrade your subscription and all the stuff you have stored exceeds what is offered in the free tier then of you need to back up your data before the subscription is over.
When I decided not to renew my subscription, Proton completely locked me out of my account after 30 days – including access to Proton Pass, which stores all my 2FA codes and Passwords.
Do you mean you just removed the payment method and let the auto renewal lapse? If that is the case, the question:
AITA for thinking i should’ve been treated better?
can be answered with yes.
When you decide to not renew renew your susbcription, then you have to downgrade manually, not just let the auto renewal lapse.
When I decided not to renew my subscription, Proton completely locked me out of my account after 30 days – including access to Proton Pass, which stores all my 2FA codes and Passwords.
Do you mean you manually cancelled your subscription by downgrading yourself and still got locked out?
AITA for thinking i should’ve been treated better?
In that case, the answer is no.
To my understanding, without knowing your case obviously, it sounds like scenario 1 applies. Then that would be a user fault.
Nonetheless, the Proton support team aren’t monsters and usually a solution can be found with them.
I think these are valid criticisms for a company that’s trying to be better than big tech. Were it any other company I’d probably say these are all expected and play it off as big business putting profit before people.
But Proton: take the criticism and be better. That’s why so many of us subscribe here and not elsewhere.
You should at the very least not be locked out of accessing your data. Any extra features should be limited, like sending/receiving emails or creating/modifying/autofilling logins, but you shouldn’t be locked out of the data. That’s how every email system, cloud storage system, and password manager I’ve ever used works.
This is so stupid. How on earth can anyone justify being locked out of their own data ? All cuz he decided to unsubscribe or forgot his payment ? We all are proton fanboys here but this is just plain stupid!
How are you able to do that? Every time I try even smaller segments than that, it fails after downloading ~300MB, the speed drops to 0bytes/second and never recovers. This has been my experience with trying to download pretty much anything from proton drive.
If someone’s missed a payment and eventually decided to not continue the service, a better idea would be to let the person download all his data without having to subscribe all over again. Give him a day or two to do it.
You aren’t going to be locked out of your data from one day to the other, other than due to self neglicence in my opinion.
There’s a 30 day window:
If your subscription bill remains unpaid 30 days from the date it was issued, your account will no longer accept incoming mail until your bill is paid. Please note that billing continues even if your account has not been paid.