I think the freemium model discussed here is severely limiting your product and it's value for non-paying customers in order to get them to pay up. One of the

I think the freemium model discussed here is severely limiting your product and it's value for non-paying customers in order to get them to pay up. One of the most powerful advantages of Gmail vs the competition is it's superbly powerful spam filtering and search features - I doubt it's worth losing that powerful image in order to get a few more users to pay up. Just like the biggest advantage and product feature ProtonMail has is privacy and encryption - it would be a bad product decision to remove encryption from all free customers in order to get them to pay up. The alternative is to offer a fully functional free* model that focuses on your strength, and charge customers for extra - extremely useful and important, but non product essential - features. * Some would argue that Google's model is not free, as you are paying for it with your data, but that is a different discussion and outside the scope here.