Andy Yen

Known for: Proton founder (ProtonMail, Proton VPN, etc)

Proton claims to be politically neutral, but in early 2025 Andy praised the Republican party on X, and Proton issued an “official response” on Mastodon and Reddit (later deleted as “not actually official”) re-enforcing that Proton and/or Andy threw their hat in with Trump and the Republican party.

—Weird Little Guys

Current best alternative if you want to stay in the cloud: Tuta

Mail - Tuta Mail

VPN - IVPN or AirVPN (Never been independently audited but cheaper and has port forwarding)

Drive - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Drive

Calendar - Selfhost Nextcloud or Tuta Calendar

Docs/Sheets - Selfhost Nextcloud or LibreOffice (offline)

Pass - Bitwarden or KeePassXC (offline)

Authenticator - 2FA or Aegis (both are offline but that's a good thing with 2FA)

Meet - Jitsi

Lumo - Local AI or Kagi Assistant (paid, comes with privacy-focused search engine) or Duck.ai (free)

Wallet - Cake Wallet

For me it's their ransomware-like business model of: attracting new users with free accounts, incentivizing them to migrate their Gmail inbox to Proton (Easy Switch), encrypting the content ("for security"), and then letting them find out that a paid feature (Bridge) is necessary to integrate the mailbox into a third-party client like Thunderbird (as a decryption layer in between); well, unless you want to manually export the mailbox using their Mail Export Tool. I'm not opposed to paying for a service (I also donate to Disroot), but I dropped them like a hot brick when I found out: thankfully not the hard way (I tested integration before migration).

I'll keep it short, but provide links for further reading. First off, I don't think proton is "bad", or anyone is trash-talking them legitimately. Both their jurisdiction (Switzerland), dedication to FOSS and good audit results make them a solid choice.

Diversification is my main reason why I'd never go all-in on Proton. Over the years, they've grown an ever more complete suite of apps (e-mail, calendar, VPN, password manager, docs, AI) that does share some similarity with the Google app suite in that you're essentially putting all eggs in one company's basket - and a lot of trust with that. If Proton got hacked, got subverted by a three-letter agency, or just got taken advantage of by a rogue employee, the effects would be much more impactful than if it had just been your e-mail provider, just your VPN service, just your...

Also, Proton's official social media account echoing CEO Andy Yen's private statements on U.S. politics haven't helped convince people that the company is, indeed, politically neutral and solely focused on privacy.

Murena (Mail, Cloud, Workspace, Vault, Galery, Office suite, Tasks, Calendar, Notes, Phones (FairPhone), e/OS, e/Os for kids), OpenSource, encrypted, made in the EU (France)

Proton’s CEO loves republicans and supports fascist influencers.

Its pretty slow and clunky for an email service. On a whim, I made an account with https://posteo.de/en. Performance and interface is much better.

Nothing, people just hold on to the CEO bullshit take on US politics, which was said in early 2025, which is almost 2 years ago at this point.

Tldr: emotion-driven incels making a scene for a non-issue, but i can understand why bcuz USA republicans are a cancer to the world like Israel.

Yes. There is controversy about the CEO. But mostly for me: is security theater. And in don't trust them. Email will never work as a secure communication layer. Stop pretending it will. There a reasons which is tied to the protocol level, that make pgp non sufficient. There are also the pgp technology it self (no forward secrecy, no deniability, key management etc). Then there is the obvious fact about an email from proton to gmail, and 99% of other email providers, simply not being secure/encrypted. So you buy a privacy tool, which neglects to tell you: we actually don't provide privacy at all - unless you treat proton emails as proton chat - strictly proton to proton.. at which point youd be better of with e g signal.

If you insist: mailfence.org allows you to upload and control you own pgp keys. That's interoprational with proton. Simarly priced i think, also Schweiz, and a bit more honest and strict imap (no bridge). But honestly.. stop treating email as secure.

From what I understand, Proton's CEO has polarizing opinions to put it lightly. There's other controversies than that, but that seems to be the main point of contention now in days.

As for alternatives, you have 3. Tutanota, Mailbox.org, or using mainstream options and manually using OpenGPG encryption yourself.

First and foremost any for-profit organization on a long enough trend line tends to inshitify, and proton is a for-profit organization masquerading as a not-for-profit one ( it has an NPO in its Advisory Board).

So I don't want to rely on any one platform vendor or Cloud host or point of failure for my privacy and my productivity, not after Google, never again. Even if I allow a few components of proton into my text act, I wouldn't want to be locked into the ecosystem.

Second, it's leadership has said permissive things about fascists in my country in the past few years. They have donated to political organizations I do not want to align with their values and interests are not necessarily mine.

For those reasons, I use one vendor with European hosting for my password manager, a different one for my email and calendar, (Tutanota) and I am actively evaluating what office and productivity Suite I will use going forward , but currently just use Libra office wherever I need it and cryptpad when I need to quickly share something in a table or document with people over the internet.

VPN and privacy apps come from DuckDuckGo for great about not retaining my info.

Myself host my photos (Immich) and files using free open source software projects , along with my media library through Jellyfin.

This is my personal opinion and only that, my opinion. If your options are proton or Google, proton. If you have the ability, technical ability (in some cases), and mental bandwidth to diversify those services, that's even better. And if you want to securely and properly self host your own options that match your specific threat level, that's the best.

I personally use paid proton for my email. I occasionally use the free VPN, and I have several things in their drive as a backup to my backup of my backup. I personally would not put all my eggs in the proton basket because I did that in the past with Google and if we're ignoring the privacy portion, they have discontinued so many things over the years that I learned not to put ALL my faith in ONE company.

Edit to add, I also didn't even touch the CEO thing but I see several others have. If we account for that, I'd still say it's significantly better than Google.

Ceo is a trumper

*poogle

proton is purple google