varn.dev

After the debacle last week with Proton and their CEO not only having AI psychosis but also just being a general ass all around, I decided that I can’t support a company that treats their employees that way, ESPECIALLY when it comes to one that values privacy and security as Proton claims to do.

I was on Proton Unlimited and their suite of tools, but really only used Proton Mail, Proton VPN and Proton Drive. So I had to do some deep digging and find replacements for all three, so I could get off of the Proton platform entirely. Here’s what I went with:

EMAIL - I opted to switch to Fastmail. While their privacy isn’t as robust as Proton’s in general (they don’t tout E2E encryption and are headquartered in the US), they do offer a comparable service that gets you away from Big Tech, and also allows you to host your data in the EU. It’s not a 1 to 1 fit, but they are affordable and private enough for most of my purposes.

VPN - After a lot of digging on this one, I was torn between IVPN and Windscribe, but opted to go with Windscribe. Their UI seemed better overall and they allow you to build your own connection, just paying for possible countries you might want to connect to, and they seemed a pretty close comparison to Proton VPN, with even more security and privacy settings. I use a VPN just as an extra step to protect my privacy online (I know it’s not foolproof) and especially on mobile, surfing from the EU is a much better, ad blocking experience when on a VPN

CLOUD DRIVE - I chose to go with Filen for cloud drive backup. Based in the EU as well, they aren’t as big of a house hold name but all of the reviews stressed their speed and affordability. Since I’m mostly just backing up work related things, I didn’t need the real overkill that Proton Drive offered, so something more manageable (and cheaper) with reasonable storage limits seemed to work well for me.

I’m only a few days into using each of these but so far so good and no complaints. Stay tuned to my Uses page for any other updates that come along!