Proton AG has updated its services under a unified design. The logos for all the company's services have been updated with a modern design. The icons look very similar to Google's style. And as expected, Protonmail.com now redirects to Proton.me, which is the brand's new identity.
Aesthetic improvements aside, there are some important changes to the services that it offers. Your email addresses @protonmail.com, @pm.me, @protonmail.ch, and custom domains remain the same.
Proton's new plans
We won't be discussing the free tier because it hasn't gained much. But, I should mention that free users can claim a free yourusername@proton.me email address for free until June 8th. If you missed the previous opportunity, go and get your free alias now.
Let's take a look at the pricing and features of the paid plans. All users who were subscribed to a plan before May 25th 2022, have been upgraded to a new Proton plan that best matches the old plan, without an increase in the fee. This includes a bump in the cloud storage space as well.
The thing is, Proton is applying a special discount for old users, to allow them to renew at the old rates. If a user decides to switch to a different plan, they will have to give up on this special discount. e.g. if you want to upgrade from Plus to Unlimited, you will lose your discount.
Proton Visionary and Lifetime Subscribers are getting a special upgrade, they get 3000 GB of storage space, that's right 3TB, on Proton Drive. You can use up to 100 email addresses on the service. That's a great reward for supporting Proton.
There are 2 new plans from the company: Proton Unlimited and Proton Business. So in total, there are 4 tiers: Proton Free, Proton Mail Plus, Proton Unlimited and Proton Visionary.
Proton Mail Plus
This is the basic premium plan offered by Proton, and it costs the same as before, with the prices starting at $4.99 a month, and goes up to $47.88 for one year ($3.99/month), or $83.76 for two years ($3.49/month). But the Mail Plus plan offers more benefits than before. Users get 15GB of storage space (shared across Proton's services) which is an extra 10GB on top of the 5GB they had earlier.
ProtonMail Plus allows subscribers to use up to 10 email addresses (previously 5), access to Proton Drive, and Proton Calendar and Bridge. Catch-all, which collects emails from all addresses in your domain, is now available for Proton Plus users, this was previously locked in the Professional plan.
Proton Unlimited
Proton's Unlimited plan offers the best of both worlds for Mail and VPN users. It grants 15 email addresses, Proton Drive, Calendar, Bridge, and all the bonuses from the premium VPN plan. It supports 1700 servers in 60+ countries, and no restrictions such as P2P downloads. To top it all, it also gives users a whopping 500GB of cloud storage. The prices for Proton Unlimited start at $11.99/month, $119.88 for one year ($9.99/month), or $191.76 for two years ($7.99/month).
Proton Business plans are essentially the same as the personal Mail Plus and Unlimited plans, but allows adding more users and are hence more expensive.
Proton Professional, Family and Visionary Plans
ProtonMail Professional plans have been migrated to Proton Business Essentials. This also means that there is a bigger gap between the prices of the Mail Plus and Unlimited plans, so it is in a way an increase in the prices. Refer to my previous article for screenshots of the old plans and their prices.
Proton Visionary plans are no longer available for purchase. ProtonMail has also discontinued its family plan. If you want to include more users in your plan, you'll have to go for the Business Plan, which is quite expensive on a per-user basis. Speaking of which, add-ons are no longer available for personal plans, if you want to customize your plan, you need to opt for a Business plan.
Proton VPN plan prices for new subscribers
Proton has scrapped its ProtonVPN Basic plan. Let's say a user is just interested in the VPN service, (not the email), they can no longer subscribe to ProtonVPN for $5 a month. But wait, it does show $5 a month, doesn't it? Not really, that option is only valid for a year's subscription, as in it costs $5/month annually, you'll have to pay the full amount for 12 months,
The new starter plan for the VPN service costs $9.99 a month. That looks like a 100% price hike, but it is just the old ProtonVPN Plus plan being rebranded as the basic tier. Take a look at Mullvad VPN for example, they still offer VPN services at $5 a month.
Interestingly, users who were on ProtonVPN Basic plans have been upgraded to Unlimited, so they get to pay $5 a month for Mail and VPN. But those who were on Mail Plus and VPN Plus bundle, say they have to pay $12 for the same features. So, there's definitely a bit of inconsistency with regard to the plan upgrades.
You can read Proton's article to learn more about the pricing. The website's design is a bit too bright and colorful for my liking.
Are you happy with Proton's new prices? What you think about the new design?
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