A friendly letter from a long-time fan who just wants to buy some storage.
I’ve been a Proton customer for about a decade — since the days when signing up for ProtonMail felt like joining a small experiment rather than subscribing to a service. Back then, supporting Proton meant taking a real chance on a small, unproven project run by people who believed users should be the customers, not the product. I bought in early, literally and philosophically, and I’ve never regretted it.
Which is why what follows is written with a lot of affection and just a little bit of “come on, folks.”
The setup
Like many early adopters, I’m on a grandfathered Proton Unlimited plan. That comes with a few nice perks the company gave to people who backed them in the early days:
- Early-bird pricing — a discount locked in for as long as I keep my subscription.
- A permanent 2-year plan — the price and terms don’t drift.
- Carried-over storage bonuses — 540 GB instead of the standard 500 GB, from the days when Proton was still figuring out how to reward long-term users. (Since the 2022 Storage Bonus revamp, every paid plan now automatically earns +10 GB per year just for sticking around — a nice touch, and exactly the kind of thing that makes people feel like Proton sees them.)
That’s a lovely little bundle. It’s the reward for showing up early, and it makes staying subscribed feel like a mutual relationship rather than a transaction. So far, so good.
The trigger
I’ve finally started the migration I’ve been putting off for years: getting 20 years of my digital life off Google and onto Proton.
That’s not an abstract number. That’s:
- Photos and videos of my children growing up — first steps, first days at school, birthdays, holidays, the daily small stuff that becomes precious in hindsight.
- Personal documents I need to keep for years or forever — mortgage paperwork, payslips, doctors’ notes, tax documents, contracts, warranties, and everything else adult life quietly accumulates.
This is the exact category of data I don’t want sitting on Google’s servers being data-mined. It’s also the category of data I trust Proton with precisely because of everything Proton says about who they are — a company where I, the user, am the customer, not the product. Moving it to Proton isn’t just a storage decision, it’s an act of trust. And an expensive one to reverse.
So I did what any happy customer would do when they need more of a product they already love: I went looking for the “buy more storage” button.
The discovery
There is no button.
On Proton Unlimited, the storage amount is fixed. There is no add-on. No à-la-carte option. No “top up another 500 GB for £X/month.” The only way to get more space through an existing plan is to change plans entirely:
- Proton Duo — 1 TB shared between two users (plus +15 GB/year bonus). Paying for a second account I don’t need, to get half a terabyte more for myself, is a strange kind of upsell.
- Proton Family — 3 TB shared across up to six people (+50 GB/year bonus). Same problem, more so.
- Proton for Business — customisable, but priced and structured around user seats. It’s an organisation product, not a solo one.
None of those fit a single user who just wants more space on the plan they already have and love. Awkward, but okay — maybe I could work something out with support?
The email that stung
I reached out. Here’s the reply, near verbatim:
“Since you’re an early user, upgrading to a different plan would mean losing your early user benefits, including your discounted early bird pricing and your permanent 2-year plan. If you upgrade, you would be switched to a standard yearly subscription, which would be significantly more expensive than what you’re currently paying, similar to pricing for new users.”
Read that again slowly.
A long-term, paying customer who wants to give Proton more money for more storage is told the only way to do so is to surrender the loyalty benefits they earned for being an early supporter.
That isn’t a trade-off. That’s a penalty for loyalty.
Why this matters (beyond just me being grumpy)
This is where I want to be really clear: I’m not writing this because I feel entitled to free stuff, or because I think Proton owes me something for being here early. Proton doesn’t owe me a permanent free lunch, and the early-adopter perks are already generous.
What I’m pointing out is that the current setup actively disincentivises the exact behaviour Proton needs to encourage:
- It disincentivises long-term commitment. The message to every early adopter is: your loyalty has a shelf life. The moment your needs grow, you’ll be moved onto standard pricing like anyone else — so why stay locked in?
- It disincentivises early support. Future would-be early adopters watching this play out will (rightly) conclude that being an early backer buys you a shrinking pond, not a growing one.
- It leaves money on the table. Every grandfathered user who would happily pay for a storage add-on is currently a customer Proton is politely refusing to upsell. That is genuinely unusual behaviour for a subscription business.
None of this is malicious on Proton’s part. It reads much more like a gap in the product catalogue that no one has gotten around to closing, combined with billing systems that make “add-ons on legacy plans” fiddly to implement. I get it. Real engineering trade-offs. But the effect on customers is the same: we’re being told our money isn’t welcome.
What I’m actually asking for
Not much, honestly:
A paid storage add-on for existing plans. That’s it.
- Priced fairly, per some sensible chunk (say, +500 GB or +1 TB).
- Available on Unlimited (and ideally on Mail Plus and other individual tiers too).
- Purchasable without forfeiting grandfathered pricing, permanent-plan terms, or accumulated bonuses.
That would turn every long-term user with a growing archive from a slightly frustrated fan into a bigger paying customer. It’s pure incremental revenue. And it would send a clear signal to the community that early adopters aren’t second-class citizens as the product grows around them.
If you’re a Proton user reading this
The most useful thing anyone can do here isn’t to be angry on Reddit — it’s to make the ask visible where the product team actually looks.
- Proton has an official suggestion platform at protonmail.uservoice.com. Search for something like “storage add-on” or “additional storage,” and if there’s an existing request, upvote it and add a comment describing your situation. Consolidated votes get noticed faster than scattered duplicates.
- The Proton Community hub (proton.me/community) lists surveys, betas, and other feedback channels.
- The r/ProtonMail and r/ProtonDrive subreddits have active Proton staff who do pay attention.
To the Proton team, if this reaches you
I’m still here. I’m still paying. I still tell people to switch off Google. I still believe in what you’re building — probably more than most, which is why I’m bothering to write this at all rather than just quietly moving my photos to a NAS.
Twenty years of my family’s photos and my most important personal documents are on their way to your servers because I trust you with them more than I trust anyone else. That trust is the whole product. Please don’t let the users who have carried it the longest feel like the growth of the company left them behind. Give us a way to keep giving you money as our needs grow, without asking us to hand back the perks we earned by betting on you early.
Add the add-on. We’ll happily pay for it.
If you’re on a grandfathered Proton plan and this resonates, please share and upvote on User Voice — the signal from real paying customers is what shifts the roadmap.