Proton will increase the prices of premium plans for new subscribers of ProtonMail and VPN

Proton AG has announced that it is making some changes to its services. The company published an article about it a few days ago, but has since replaced it with a different version.

I compared both articles to gather the important information from them.

What are the upcoming changes to ProtonMail?

Proton wants to update its services with a uniform design to represent its brand. This "visual identity" will include new logos and colors by which users will recognize Proton's services. The unified service will be accessible from the Proton.me domain. The company is shifting to it to highlight the fact that it offers more than just mail services, it has ProtonDrive, Calendar, VPN, etc. It's quite similar to what Google does with its suite of web apps.

While your ProtonMail address will remain the same, any official communication including newsletters, notifications, password reset messages that you receive from the company will use the @proton.me domain instead of @protonmail.com. So don't be alarmed thinking you got a mail from a user who is impersonating the brand. Mails from Proton are always starred to indicate it is sent by the company.

The original article indicated that Proton will redirect users who access Protonmail.com, mail.protonmail.com, calendar.protonmail.com, etc., to their respective Proton.me domains. This will only affect new user sessions, i.e., users who are already logged in to their accounts will remain on the .com domain. ProtonVPN will also remain at protonvpn.com for now, but it too will be updated in the future. The unified service will allow users to add events in your mails to your calendar, and files that you have stored in Proton Drive can be sent as attachments simply by linking to them.

And now, for the important changes regarding the Premium subscription plans.

Upcoming changes to Proton Plans

After listening to feedback from users, Proton says that it will not change the prices of the plans for existing subscribers. It is worth mentioning that the original announcement caused a bit of confusion, as it did not mention whether this price hike would affect renewals, but the updated post has confirmed that existing subscribers can renew their plan at the current prices. This basically confirms that new users will have to pay a higher fee than the current rates.

The original article also mentioned that Proton users who subscribe to ProtonMail and ProtonVPN will be automatically updated to a new bundle that also includes Proton Drive and Proton Calendar, and that this upgrade will be free of charge. But that statement has been removed in the new article, it now reads "all plans will be upgraded to provide more storage and features for our existing subscribers". This probably includes Drive and Calendar.

Here are the current prices of ProtonMail and ProtonVPN for reference.

I didn't save a screenshot of the original announcement or the page itself to web archive, but my RSS reader saved an offline copy of the contents. I used the text from it to upload the text to a privacy-friendly paste bin site. You can read it, and compare it with the current post on Proton's site. It's important because the new article seems to lack some information.

Proton intends to roll out the updates to its services this week, but has not revealed its new premium plan prices yet.

What's your take on this? Will you lock in to the current prices by subscribing to a plan now?

Advertisement