Proton
Empowering you to choose a better internet where privacy is the default. Protect yourself online with Proton Mail, Proton VPN, Proton Calendar, Proton Drive. Proton Pass and SimpleLogin.
Proton Mail is the world's largest secure email provider. Swiss, end-to-end encrypted, private, and free.
Proton VPN is the world’s only open-source, publicly audited, unlimited and free VPN. Swiss-based, no-ads, and no-logs.
Proton Calendar is the world's first end-to-end encrypted calendar that allows you to keep your life private.
Proton Drive is a free end-to-end encrypted cloud storage that allows you to securely backup and share your files. It's open source, publicly audited, and Swiss-based.
Proton Pass Proton Pass is a free and open-source password manager which brings a higher level of security with rigorous end-to-end encryption of all data (including usernames, URLs, notes, and more) and email alias support.
SimpleLogin lets you send and receive emails anonymously via easily-generated unique email aliases.
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If you want an online service set to be big enough to be in common awareness, you need users.
Free users are the cheapest advertisements possible. You already have to have the infrastructure built to have the service in the first place, and people will jump at "free". It's already proven that you can attract users and convert enough of them to paying customers by offering a lesser service for free to lead to profitability. Now, the model proton uses is way less profitable than Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter, or any of the other ~~ad servers~~ social network/email services, but that's a secondary issue, and not a negative one.
My free proton account using ass is directly responsible for making 3 paying users aware it existed in the first place. And there's a few more where people tried the service after I gave a good word when they asked about it after hearing of it in other ways. Every email I send to someone via that account is a form of advertising because non-gmail accounts that are also not isp accounts draw attention sometimes.
Now, at this point they could do fine without a free tier. If they phased it out correctly, they could probably do it without pissing enough paying people off to the extent of being an issue. But the fact that they haven't is another point in their favor.
You guys, the paying customers? Thank you. Y'all are making sure my old, crippled ass has a good alternative to gmail without an extra expense that would be hard to afford.
We free tier users are not really free, we are still part of the product, just in a non invasive, non abusive way.