Similar to Spotify’s “Spotify Duo” membership subscription. It’s just my wife and I, we don’t have 4 other members in our family. $20 per month is too much but something closer to 10-15 that would be a no brainer.
[4:42PM EST EDIT]: Detailed financial breakdown / explanation below:
For people like my wife and I who don’t use drive. I have my own NAS / storage solution. The amount that Mail Plus offers (18gb or 36gb since my wife also has Mail Plus) is more than enough for our needs.
Here is a breakdown of services paid individually (my wife doesn’t use VPN):
Proton Mail Plus: $3.99 x 2
Bitwarden: $0.83m ($10y) x 2
Nord VPN (used to be Atlas): $2.05 ($49.21 / 24) x1
Total: $11.7 per month.
[6/24 10:13AM EST EDIT]:
For people asking to “share” the additional 4 accounts with friends (since Proton “loosely” defines family). I don’t want to be an IT department, sorry. If anything goes wrong ever or having to collect payment. That’s just something I don’t want to deal with. Thank you for the advise!
Some users are mentioning using Proton Business. I can’t seem to make this work since they only have Mail Essentials which does not include VPN or Pass. But let me know if / how you got it to work.
[8/15 9:58 EST EDIT]:
The Proton gods have answered the call, DUO IS HERE!
Yeah, they need to improve their pricing. I’m on the family plan and it works for me, but there’s plenty of people that just need to buy features as and when.
I suspect Proton are missing out on sales by not having a middle ground.
I’m on the same boat. And is looking more and more like it will be the reason for me to move away from Proton. I’m on unlimited, wife is on Plus and we use 1Password family (4 users).
I almost make the move to Proton Pass, but found that hers would be limited and no way to upgraded it, without upgrading her to unlimited too. Paying for services she won’t use, just makes no sense.
And paying for pass individually at 25 bucks per user, would be 75 bucks a year just for pass and 3 users.
I’m paid until 2025. So I’m trying to control myself till renewal. But it bugs me. So right now I’m in a love/hate relationship with Proton… lol
I’d also like to see unlimited (or one per person) domains on Family. When the kids grow up they will probably want to move their email elsewhere and that would be way easier if they each had their own domain.
Well they want you to move from other services to theirs which than makes pricing better for the user.
If you get unlimited and therefore stop paying for e.g. NordVPN and Pass and therefore stop paying for Bitwarden etc the monthly price for unlimited goes down.
Regarding Drive I would not purchase it as standalone product given its features and the few storage options but I use it since it’s in the unlimited bundle. My main storage is my NAS but I use Proton Drive as a backup. Before I used stuff like iCloud / G-Drive / Dropbox (in their free tiers except iCloud where I paid the 200GB option) and backed up my most important files there in encrypted files. Now with Proton Drive I don’t need to manually encrypt my files before uploading. It makes my workflow easier.
Regarding your main issue OP I agree a duo plan would be nice if you don’t need unlimited for six people. I would pay 15€ per month for 2x unlimited for my partner and myself easily. With the only option for them being a single unlimited subscription or the family plan it is not really attractive since my partner not necessarily values privacy the same way I do.
Not sure if this helps you but I have the same Usecase and I came to the conclusion that it’s best to just have a business account with 2 users over paying for family.
I’ve settled in Proton never really being a perfect fit. I have my own NAS and think Drive is still very clunky and lacking many basic features for us to use it.
The VPN + ProtomPass + custom domain mail.is worth the plan for me.
Email is just so old and unsafe, it’s really the cleanest way for me to try and keep my kids as safe as I can.
It’s just my wife and I, we don’t have 4 other members in our family
FYI, Proton Family is not limited to members of your actual family, so if you have any friends who are interested in joining Proton, you can share the cost with them.
OR EVEN a plan thats like " Start out with 15 gigs of storage, then add more for $x.xx USD a month or per year".
I am kind of a email hoarder, I keep MOST things, and I hate to think about what I would have to do if I was to get near 14 gigs of data, having to move all of that info off of the server to local folders.
I don’t even know what to do here in Linux?
Select all emails and “copy to FOLDER NAME on LOCAL FOLDERS?”
Or set a rule in my email client ( Like Evolution) :
" IF EMAIL IS OLDER THAN 1 YEAR THEN move to FOLDER NAME on LOCAL FOLDERS?"