Three things.

• There was a legal situation years back and the Swiss Corporation was approached over the contents they held for a customer in France(IIRC) and some of the French people reported that when they complied that Proton had given them Everything they had on him, which wasn’t true, all they gave was the metadata that was in the clear already. Some of the news sources, including the first few I saw on it, had the French framing and reported it as such. A privacy company just giving up a users data like that left a bad taste in peoples mouths, and it turns out only some of the original reports corrected the false narrative and just pulled the story down. I had to personally eat crow on that one with more than a few people.
• A founder and C-Suite member of the company personally supported the Trump Administration several times allegedly without discussing it with his more centrist and left leaning collogues. Proton as an organization did not yeet him out over that, but recent ICE and military activity did not change his mind.
• Proton, and many other privacy first services are offering common services for free but with limits that no long term Google, Yahoo, or Apple Mail/Outlook user can operate in, let alone for all their services, and their first paid tier is also too anemic for shared storage, so you are stuck either deleting your content or paying for their highest paid package. This for apps that are threadbare as instead of flushing out the featureset they have allegedly focused on putting out new products more often. This isn’t that popular.

In short, while a great choice compared to most other similar service providers, Proton’s track record has started showing inconsistencies between their privacy/security claims and the truth.

Lets start off with proton mail’s E2E encryption. While the ideal is awesome, the fact is metadata isn’t encrypted. This results in sender/receiver info, the subject lines, timestamps, and IP addresses available in the logs. Meaning if the Swiss government wants that data, proton legally must comply. Their 2025 transparency report had over 9,000 legal requests, and they complied with 89% of them. This counters the many proton promotions claiming they have no access to user info. Along these same lines, proton identified a political activist to Swiss authorities due to a US legal request that led to about 60 activists being brought up on RICO charges. Additionally, proton made a similar mess by suspending the accounts of journalists working on a North Korean hacker story at the request of a cybersecurity agency they refused to name. While they eventually reinstated the accounts, this rightfully led to public criticism, seeing as proton promotes being a private, secure, and journalist-friendly service.

There are also controversies surrounding the inaccurate or incorrect use of the terms non-profit and open-source. Proton has framed itself as a nonprofit organization pretty hard more recently, this being the Proton Foundation, which is the biggest shareholder of Proton AG. But Proton AG is without question a for-profit business, and it also runs all the services offered by Proton. It’s said this was done to prevent another tech company from buying the majority of the share but seems more to be a cover for the fact they’re ultimately in it for the money. This being the case actually helps make more sense of their AI controversy. Since day one, they said Lumo was an open source privacy-focused model, but the only code published so far is for the website and mobile apps, with nothing at all for Lumo itself, even though it was released in June 2024.

So while there’s no doubt they do a number of things extremely well, they also talk a real big game and seem to be unable to back it up across the board.

Didn’t they also do a crypto wallet product when that was all the rage? I think their decision to engage with that industry also left a bad taste in some people’s mouths.

The crypto wallet is still going. I’ve moved my few pennies over to it

That was the time it became apparent they weren’t in it as a niche privacy company, they just wanted to bandwagon to grow numbers.

Re: Proton Foundation -> Proton AG, this is almost the exact same setup Mozilla uses.

One difference is Mozilla Corporation has only one share, owned by Mozilla Foundation.

It is not unreasonable for a mission driven company to want to make enough money to cover their costs. (There is a line to be drawn somewhere, though)

Nonprofit’s use profit to reinvest in the business, so they definitely still focus on covering operating cost. Meaning if they make a ton of money one year, it just can’t be used to line the pockets of the c-suite or some small group of people like most corporations do!

Both ProtonAG and MoCo are for-profit companies.

It’s a company. As such, it wants to make money. As such, it hires people to make that happen. Those people tend to think in certain pathways. When that happens, any company eventually falls into the same anti-user behaviors

The following article explains one of the more recent controversies:

Proton Mail Faces Backlash Over Claims of Political Neutrality Amid CEO’s Praise for Republican Party.

As far as alternatives, here’s a couple:

Tutanota is one of the more popular in regards to email. Posteo is another one.

In regards to ProtonDrive, I’d suggest learning how to self host your own NextCloud or OpenCloud instance.

The rest of their services I’m unfamiliar with. Do some more research, simple search engine lookups should help you in regards to all of these.

I tried proton awhile ago. It didn’t have IMAP back then (idk if thats changed) so I signed up and have been happy w Posteo ever since. (About a decade)

Murena.com works fine for me as an alternative to Google / Proton