Register your own domain and get that going as your email. Then you can try all the suggestions in this thread nearly risk free.

Proton hooked me with mail, vpn, password management, and drive. That was what I needed to replace Gmail and one drive at the time.

They’ve ignored the Linux development the community consistently asked for and introduced Lumo the useless chatbot instead.

They still check a lot of the boxes if you want something privacy respecting and easy. The ceo chose to run his mouth in a detrimental way, and walked it back slightly after backlash… so there’s that.

For mail, Fastmail is a.much closer replacement to GMail. It’s the only provider I found that supports the same “Send as” feature that GMail has. It works with standard IMAP/JMAP/SMTP. I wish the Android app was separated into separate mail and calendar apps, though.

A problem common to Proton and Fastmail is they don’t feed into the system content providers for calendar and contacts, so that data is isolated from other apps. Fastmail supports CardDav and CalDav, though, so you can use CALx⁵ DAVx⁵ to get that sync.

Neither of them integrate Maps with their calendar.

Proton famously has no real offline mode at least for calendar, and the calendar app has no search (last I tried).

Proton Pass doesn’t let you specify a match algorithm so if you have separate logons for different subdomains (foo.example
com.and bar.example.com) it will show you all of them.

As others have mentioned, Proton has been spending time developing apps nobody asked for, like a crypto wallet and AI bot, instead of addressing popular user requests such as the aforementioned “send as” on mail, alternative domain matching in Pass, offline/search/maps in Calendar. They did just recently announce that they’re working on a Linux Drive client, they get credit for that.

I migrated away from proton for mail and calendar about 4 months ago. The services are fine, they do what they say, but the trade offs for “e2ee” email are large with a dubious benefit when it works and no benefit in 99% of cases because the vast majority of people don’t use Proton so your Mail is not encrypted anyways. I still use Pass, VPN, and SimpleLogin. They, IMO, are the best services Proton offers (though I may move passwords back to bitwarden, still deciding).

Overall it’s worth considering what secure email means to you, what your individual threat landscape looks like, and then comparing what Proton offers to your needs. Personally I migrated to Fastmail and have been pleased so far. It won’t be right for everyone, and for some the security offered by Proton may be valuable, but know there are a ton of asterisks to that security.

Personally I can’t recommend it, and I’ll likely migrate away soon.

Proton VPN is the only part that I’m really happy with, it has always just worked for me whenever I needed it, but I don’t use it that often.

Proton Mail is underdeveloped. I constantly run into missing features and general pain. Once I lost a really huge email draft I was writing because of some connectivity/sync issues and there was no option for recovery, even though I was sure the contents were still in memory somewhere, just inaccessible. I had to rewrite that from scratch.

Proton Drive is iffy. One of my main uses for it is to back up my photos and videos from my Android phone, and this could really be improved. There is no option to delete the local copy to free up space on the device, you have to do that manually and double-check that each thing you delete is actually backed up, which is tedious. Long videos (20+ minutes) fail to upload at all and crash the app with a memory leak, last I tried it. Photos and videos aside, as cloud storage it has generally worked for me, but as I use Linux I can only use it through a web browser, so there’s no option to sync a folder. This is by far the biggest complaint users have - that they need to make a Proton Drive client for Linux.

All of these issues, I have brought up with Proton support and they have never made any improvements or fixed.

Proton Calendar also feels undercooked, I don’t have more details on that except that it’s more bothersome to use than calendar apps I’ve used in the past. There is no agenda view that spans multiple days, for instance.

SimpleLogin is great, but it wasn’t actually developed at Proton, instead was just bought up by them. Nevertheless, I use it a lot and will likely keep a standalone subscription to it in the future.

I have not used their office suite alternatives, but it’s very surprising and alarming that they can’t open LibreOffice files which are an open standard.

When I do eventually move away, I intend to use Tutanota for email and calendar (hopefully it fares better), and any reputable Nextcloud provider for Drive.

Proton & Gaming: There is more than one Proton, your concern may be about the compatability layer (which works quite well in fact).

Purple Proton: If you’re a Linux user, there is no official Drive Sync client yet. Calendar sharing with non-proton accounts has some shortcomings (e.g., no recurring event updates). I’m a happy user otherwise.

Last year I used Android (tablet with a physical keyboard and mouse was my “laptop”) and nothing else. I was happy with Proton Unlimited. Lots of features and works great.

In April of 2025 I bought a used laptop and started using Linux Fedora Workstation.

It didn’t take long to see how little support Proton gives to the Linux community. Protonvpn is garbage on Linux. Their app has almost no features.

Saying development is slow is being kind, it took Proton 8 years to give Linux users split-tunneling and we still have to give up Netguard and the killswitch to use it.

I watch Youtube with Freetube on my laptop and was getting blocked at least 6 times per day.

I tried Mullvadvpn and have gotten blocked only two of three times in the past two weeks.

Downloading from Proton Drive is very slow. Upload is quick enough, it’s good for archiving. No Linux app so I use the browser.

Most of their other services work great. I have no issues with their email (through a browser) or ProtonPass via the app.

My account is up in June and I’m moving to separate services. Already on Mullvadvpn.

These are the (IMO unwarranted) concerns regarding Proton you’ll see here:

1. CEO said something nice about a Trump appointee. He then followed that up with some ignorant shit about Republicans in general. None of this affects his ability to provide a private and secure service.
2. Proton doesn’t break the law by refusing to comply with legal warrants from Switzerland. Nor does any other service other than Lavabit, which is unfortunately no longer an option.
3. Too many products. Some people think this is a bad thing, as it’s a single point of failure, and because their attention is divided. I think it’s a valid tradeoff for the convenience and the price. You can just use email if you want.

That’s all I can think of off the top of my head. I use and enjoy them but the advertising is incredibly annoying.

As for gaming, Steam (and many other services) block VPNs so if you want to play you’ll have to do it in offline mode or disconnect it. I use a dedicated gaming machine and just bother to put it on there unfortunately.

Also any web-connected services you use may ALSO block your VPN at any time and you’ll lose access to that service, which may or may not be important. You can use split-tunneling but the Android app disconnects randomly and stays disconnected. I’ve not found a fix for this. For this reason you need to use the “kill switch” that kills all connections when disconnected. Unfortunately this also blocks all local connections and breaks split-tunneling so yeah, it fuckin sucks.

I’m also in the process of migrating away. Many reasons. Mainly that fastmail offers me a better experience. And I get simple website hosting and custom domains out of it. I’ve replaced pass with 1Password and will switch to mulvad once my proton subscription expires.

My drive hosting I’ve migrated to a copyparty container on tailnet. Cloud editing and such is solved by proxy as copyparty supports WebDAV so I can just edit files with onlyoffice or the like. Even works for obsidian and Todo list syncing.

VPN and pass is probably protons best offering. Everything else always feels half baked.

If you genuinely care about digital security, self host. No tech company will ever solve it. I’ve minimized my dependencies to fastmail (mail, calendar, webhost), desec (DNS), codeberg, 1password, and tailscale. YouTube is also unavailable as it’s an insane trove of knowledge. Also bit the bullet and bought a kagi subscription and it feels nice to find things on the internet again.

Best of luck in your journey.