This is a huge problem. When Amazon.com got caught running price tests on their customers, Jeff Bezos himself apologized for the mistake.

How far have we fallen that Proton, a company that needs to be transparent to earn its users trust, can be this opaque... And then when they've finally been caught, lie about it?

If I got overcharged and found out later, I would be more than a little upset. In fact, I've refunded a Proton plan before due to a similar pricing mixup. And the requirements to refund are borderline draconian, including a bold"Refunds can only be requested once per user"

I left proton last year after realizing I was putting all my shit into one basket again

Proton is a non profit which is why I hope they change the hidden price change strategy.

But then again Open AI was founded as a nonprofit which shows how much that label actually matters.

I know it's compelling, but it is not worth putting all your trust in only one location. I mean, you're here on a decentralised network, so I'm sure you get it. And I hate to bear ill news but many developers of good-willed, for-the-people products so frequently betray their patrons' trust that it's also important to keep the ability to move to the next pure initiative.

Ever since I learned that Apple's ecosystem is designed to keep you in by buying everything with them - mainly interoperability - and given the price vs performance is (or WAS, between generations 1-16 of iPhone and every Mac) much lower than every other competitor, I learned that companies attempting a walled-garden were untrustworthy.

I scored a lifetime Windscribe Pro plan for a really good price almost a decade ago, and never had any complaints about their service.

It felt like a gamble at the time because I had never heard of them, but it has been great to watch them grow in such a positive direction like this over the years.

Yea, I got to agree, I am a paying Proton customer and I really like the product, I like the privacy first, all encryption, I like that they aren't using ads to monetize and I don't mind having a paid account if it supports them having free accounts. Honestly, there is a lot of good things they could be putting out there as great PR for Proton but between this and that French Youtuber this year, this marketing team is striking out left and right.

The worst response about that whole incident isn't even the fact they posted what's in your screenshot.

The worst part is that their official response was to boost an anonymous Medium post that alleged Proton had done nothing wrong... while ignoring the fact the entire message in that screenshot even exists.

The level of idiocy in this statement is so profound it isn't even funny. Republicans are going to regulate!? You would have to ignore all reality, history, and common sense to believe this bullshit for even a second.

better 🗃️
🤣 so much @ð capiprop

So, par for the "Democrats", then. 🙄

"General Manager" 🫡🤪

Proton's staff gets surprisingly preferential treatment on Reddit. r/privacy nuked a post that exposed Proton funding a far-right YouTuber, with their moderators tastefully calling it "FUD" and a "conspiracy".

I initially wanted to post this information on the ProtonMail subreddit to ask for an explanation and find out whether it was a mistake, but they did not approve the post. I also tried on tech subreddits here, but they consider it off-topic and as "a conspiracy theory".

Which is even heavier-handed than their typical cozy relationship with the Proton staff.

Accents you can read!🤣😂 thenks fe d lafs😂

It definitely seems to go against the spirit of how the company is being promoted.

They sell themselves as being user-oriented. There's a million things these companies could do to make money off of your data, and this one claims to sacrifice all of that for the good of the user.

Now it turns out they are using shady anti-user marketing practices, which is almost to be expected for a for-profit company in this day and age. It does not align with a model that claims to have the user's best interest at heart though, which is how they promote themselves.

Be aware I dissociate from FHF

By saying something about the competition that seemingly is true?
Correct, a competitor has the CoI of wanting the consumers of a competitor, so the source of the claim maybe in conflict with your actual interest.

I have completely claimed to dissociate from all these parties, as my interests lie in darknet proxies.

How something is framed, is different from what it actually is, even if the background is the same.

In this case, there isn’t anything notably shady about running A/B tests or deactivating a promotion using a feature flag that doesn’t reach some instances in time, I personally have run into issues like this many times.

Now, Windscribe is taking a single HTML tag as undeniable proof that Proton is trying to screw their customers. They published their “proof” in four tweets and left it there with no further explanation.

And it’s not like this is the first time they used amplified media to attract users from other platforms. They also published a satirical statement about Mullvad back when the political donation scandal came out, and they are extremely active on social media, especially Twitter and Reddit.

If this doesn't look like scary tactics and conflict of interest, I don't know what it is.

I don't think it's good. To me, it reads as a red flag, an incongruity between different approaches to marketing and the service.

If there's an incongruity with pricing, I might think, perhaps there's an incongruity to the service itself versus how it's being advertised. (And in the case of Proton, this was the case).

If a company handles your unencrypted emails, trust is paramount, and breaking that trust can unravel years of goodwill.

Proton doesnt have a great track record when it comes to the truth in general. Since them being a privacy focused vendor, it becomes a point of contention for most sane customers

Them lying about it is just fuel for the dumpster fire that proton is

So if you had subscribed at the higher price without knowing about this, but a little later would find out that if you had refreshed the page or had come back to the very same page later, you could have paid less, you would not be angry and just be happy to keep paying the higher price?

Yeah, people have a hate-boner against the best of companies all the time.