To me, data protection is pretty important. I live in the US, where our privacy laws are subpar at best, normally non-existent. We generate a huge amount of data, only for our companies and government to sift through and correlate it to our every action and location. It’s creepy, and flatly antidemocratic. So when I heard of protonmail I was pretty intrigued.

When I first signed up for the service, it was when Proton was just an email provider. Nothing fancy, not much optional storage and no drive, pass or VPN. It was a simple email provider from CERN that tailored to privacy, designed by scientists. So I decided to give it a try and created a free account. At first I simply used it to send my most important emails to. (Swiss data protection is lightyears ahead of the USA) I felt no hesitation beyond the first time switching, and I honestly was highly impressed with the level of security provided in an email. Google never gave me the option to permanently block a sender and oh lordy am I happy for that! (Many ad companies in the US don’t stop sending you emails daily or hourly, even when requesting to unsubscribe. Once they purchase your email information is non-stop D:)

In short, I enjoyed the free model and never exceeded the space. That was until this year, 2025. When data protection laws in the US essentially stopped being enforced and twitter was purchased by a very extremist neo-Nazi. Two major data hacks also leaked information from both twitter and our Social Security Office. I took a hard look at Google and all my accounts across the internet and asked: are my 18000 photos worth saving on Google? Is the free storage at my university worth it, despite the incredibly lax security Google put into it? A lot of institutions were also hit with major DNS or hacking attempts, some successful in exposing faculty and student information. I kept a lot of my personal information online, so the answer was unequivocally no for me.

I decided to break out my credit card and looked more heavily into the Proton suite. In a way I knew I was going to go with Proton; the identity/ dark web protection was particularly lovely, but I still wanted to browse my options. Most were American, which still didn’t solve the problem of data being hosted in America. Ultimately I purchased a proton unlimited subscription because, again, Swiss privacy laws are light years ahead of the US.

While the drive and other apps did take a bit to load at first, and uploading all my photos was a headache from Google (Googles fault, not Protons), I was extremely satisfied with the service I got. Drive got much snappier once it caught up to itself, and gliding through to tailor some pictures into albums, crop them and give them custom labels was a breeze. The true gem though is Proton Pass. Its service helps to protect your email and data from the dark web, and alerts you to any leaks. It’s also a great password book; so much so I feel safe storing a good chunk of my information on it. You can organize your data and passwords while also enabling a high degree of security. I myself use 2FA on anything I can, and am very glad to know even if someone gets my log in info, they will still need the particular device I use to authenticate log ins.

Ultimately, the decision to move ones data from public companies like Google and Apple are personal. But if you value privacy, security and the ability to control our own data and not be turning into a profit profile, then I would argue Proton Suite and its services are more than worth the money. Yes, to get privacy you need to spend money, but lets be honest with ourselves: has any of the “free” services actually been free? Is it worth giving away every private, intimate moment with your loved ones, your co-workers and your tastes and preferences for the “free” account? I would strongly argue no. We have a right to be forgotten online, we have a right to control our data and personal information about ourselves. That’s why I paid over $100 USD to move to a better, more privacy focused digital provider; and I’ll never look back.