Being real, after the debacle that is Google happened, I refuse to put all my eggs in one basket again. Proton is great at mail, so that’s what I use them for. The only other thing I’ve considered using is their calendar because there’s really no great option for me other than Google, because of the need to have an account that everyone can use on any device. Since that includes my dad, it limits things a hell of a lot. Proton’s calendar is still something he struggles with for some reason.

Bitwarden works well for me, so I ain’t moving.

Proton VPN is good, but mullvad is better imo, or air if I ever need port forwarding again.

And, there is the money factor. I’m fixed income, so proton is bloody expensive for me. I can’t justify the extra any given service would cost, even if I wanted a single provider for everything.

Don’t get me wrong, their fee scale is solid. Enough that it shouldn’t run dry for them and need more monetization, but not so much that it isn’t affordable for most. It’s just outside of my personal budget.

If you want an online service set to be big enough to be in common awareness, you need users.

Free users are the cheapest advertisements possible. You already have to have the infrastructure built to have the service in the first place, and people will jump at “free”. It’s already proven that you can attract users and convert enough of them to paying customers by offering a lesser service for free to lead to profitability. Now, the model proton uses is way less profitable than Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other ad servers social network/email services, but that’s a secondary issue, and not a negative one.

My free proton account using ass is directly responsible for making 3 paying users aware it existed in the first place. And there’s a few more where people tried the service after I gave a good word when they asked about it after hearing of it in other ways. Every email I send to someone via that account is a form of advertising because non-gmail accounts that are also not isp accounts draw attention sometimes.

Now, at this point they could do fine without a free tier. If they phased it out correctly, they could probably do it without pissing enough paying people off to the extent of being an issue. But the fact that they haven’t is another point in their favor.

You guys, the paying customers? Thank you. Y’all are making sure my old, crippled ass has a good alternative to gmail without an extra expense that would be hard to afford.

We free tier users are not really free, we are still part of the product, just in a non invasive, non abusive way.

It’s almost like irony isn’t a thing

A privacy video on YouTube, complaining about Google…

My homie, my twerks are free for all visitors, but you gotta leave the camera at the door

And this is why I have no cameras in my home

Ehhh, depends on where you are, and what the typical income is.

For me, my crippled ass is on a fixed income, so it’s way more expensive than I can handle for something that I’m the only one that could use it.

But the price itself is realistic for someone with decent income in the US overall.

Their privacy policy lists what they collect, and it’s a fairly large amount of stuff.

Copy/paste from their site:

What data does Beeper collect?

In order to provide the service, Beeper collects device information, including OS, hardware, public IP addresses, network routing information, information on the installed Beeper client, and other device settings. Beeper also uses user account information, such as email addresses and phone numbers, to authenticate users to their accounts.

See our Privacy Policy for more details on how we collect and use personal information.

Now, that isn’t exactly what I’d call privacy friendly. However, for something like Facebook messenger, it isn’t any worse.

I intend to at least try it out if they ever send me the damn email to let me use it at all lol. But that’s primarily to see how it interacts with imessage for the folks I know that use that. I’m not going into it hoping for security, since they dick around with encryption in a way that breaks it.

They were always this way

It is not uniquely American, it just isn’t a European issue. The U.S.is not the only place that defaults to sms.

Well, that’s true. But if there’s published server code, it’s at least better than none.

There’s a point where you either decide to use the service, or just withdraw from any of them at all, if you go down that road.

Depends on your goals.

For casual shit like sending files to yourself, bullshiting with memes, or stuff like that, the unknown factor of telegram doesn’t matter.

But it is an unknown. We don’t know what their server code looks like. So you can’t trust that it isn’t doing things other than what it is supposed to.

It’s a matter of preferences tbh.