I was briefly a customer but after the first year I got very fed up with their billing model. Most services offer either pre-paid subscriptions where you buy s

I was briefly a customer but after the first year I got very fed up with their billing model. Most services offer either pre-paid subscriptions where you buy say a year upfront and it doesn't auto-renew and/or some auto-renewal where they charge your credit card at the end of the previous billing period. If you decide you don't want the service, you can, in the first case, simply not renew and in the second, you have to cancel but you're made quite aware that your credit card will be charged. This is not the case however, with Protonmail. With Protonmail, you can go through the whole checkout process without saving a credit card, which one would assume means the plan is prepaid, as it would be basically anywhere else on the internet. But it's not possible to have a non-recurring payment on Protonmail. If they don't have a credit card on file, they'll put an "invoice" (what I not-so-fondly prefer to call a ransom) for the next billing period on your account, which they expect you to pay. If you don't pay, they block your _entire_ account. If, for example, you buy a year of ProtonVPN to try it for a while and end up not liking it much but also don't think it necessary to explicitly cancel, at the end of the year you'll get an "invoice" for an entire year of ProtonVPN. If you try to ignore it, your Protonmail inbox will no longer be accessible. If you leave it for several months, you'll be forced to pay for them, even if your entire account was locked and services inaccessible for that time. I've talked to support but they show zero sympathy. The whole billing model feels like a malicious scam to me.