First, it was a little weird that the biggest draw of their premium subscription was not their cloud but extensions, which were mostly made by third parties and needed only a static site to host. But I could host my own extensions so this was no big deal.
Yes.
Then they made it harder to host and install your own extensions, making you have to select them one at a time instead of pointing to a single place.
They really want you to pay for the product, ultimately they are a business. You self hosting without a subscription doesn’t help them.
Then they started moving functionality like folders into extensions.
As a long time user… I’m fairly confident that folders always were an extension? Of course folders used to be a layer upon tags and now they’re just kinda the same thing.
… in any case it doesn’t really sound like you were ever a customer and I don’t think they’re going to miss you much. Maybe this is still good information for other folks that don’t want to pay them though.
And I haven’t been particularly thrilled with the idea of putting all my privacy needs under a single banner either.
I do share that concern. Proton is increasingly the “big privacy tech” company. That’s also not an inherently bad thing to have though as big companies do carry more weight in political discussions. They can help represent privacy in legislation (for better or worse companies are people for this purpose in the US).
Email isn’t secure. You need to put a ton of trust in your VPN provider. I don’t think either of those services should be provided by the same company…
Email can be (close to) secure with PGP, which Proton is just a fancy PGP client.
The VPN was created because they needed a VPN they could trust for their email customers in sketchy areas.
I think Proton grew out of necessity then because they realized both that they could and it’s useful for them to grow.