I've said this before but I've been waiting for almost five years now to switch to Protonmail personally - and with several clients, SMEs and startups. Why hav

I've said this before but I've been waiting for almost five years now to switch to Protonmail personally - and with several clients, SMEs and startups. Why haven't I done it? Well, for one, to this day their pricing and feature structure is utterly unattractive, orders of magnitude more expensive than competitors (especially Gsuite/Google Workspace and Microsoft 365) and thoroughly confusing. Some examples: - Want to put your whole family on the "visionary plan" (~$350/year)? Tough luck, it's limited to 6 users, so your wife's parents are out. - No multi-user support in tiers below "Professional", i.e. a family of 7 (incl. e.g. grandma) pays at least $560 per year. - Work as a consultant, juggling several projects or startups? Tough luck, 2 custom domains and 5 measly aliases included only, even on the professional plan (~$90/user)! Also a mere 5 GB of storage. Google offered twice that 10 years ago and currently 3x - for free. Google's paid accounts include up to 2 TB (!) at that price point. As for the custom domains, on my private Gsuite I currently run about 10 without problem plus and at least fifty aliases (I make new ones for many services I sign up for, my #1 spam-avoidance trick). Even if I wanted, I couldn't switch without losing a ton of functionality, security and convenience. Getting most of this in Protonmail would probably cost me an eye-watering additional ~$360 - per user! What on earth is their value proposition? Switzerland + encryption, okay, all well and good. Happy to pay some extra money for that. But not more than 10 times the amount a user costs on Google Workspace. They also have no discounts, let alone free accounts for EDU or NGOs which makes it hard very hard to convince any of these orgs to switch there seeing as they get a lot more value from Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, completely for free - and these companies know that people will be more likely to privately sign up for Gmail, Office etc. if they use it at work or at school all day. Bottom-line, I've longed for a service like Protonmail for almost half a decade now but at least the people and companies I work with don't want to pay close to what they're asking and are not willing to be nickel-and-dimed for something trivial like aliases, a catch-all address or a reasonable amount of storage (2 TB would cost ~$21,500 per year on Protonmail, according to their published price list!!). From statements of their management I suspect that they're trying to manage (and limit) growth and thus have positioned their product in a way that makes it a premium/high-end offer, certainly without the goal of getting "everyone" to switch to them. The price and feature/addon policy makes it extremely difficult to convince anybody to switch for whom privacy and encryption is "nice to have" but not worth $$$. I am a bit frustrated by this and have been for a long time. Here's to hoping that a competitor appears and offers a more attractive bundle. Or that they finally get together a growth plan or funding that allows them to reduce costs and scale to more customers quickly.