Proton Partners Program - Reviews and experiences

I work from home, push big uploads, use remote desktop and stream, and after a sketchy incident on public Wi‑Fi I wanted something solid. For ages it was fine — I regularly hit 700+ Mbps on European and US servers on my gigabit symmetrical line — but over the past few months that performance just evaporated. Now I'm lucky to see 100–150 Mbps and latency is noticeably worse across multiple servers and devices. I tried different protocols, reinstalled apps, tested at different times, even contacted support, but their answers felt vague and pointed to "other factors." My ISP hasn't changed anything and non‑VPN speeds are still great, so to me it looks like the problem moved to Proton's end. I still have Mullvad active for another year and it keeps giving me 700–800 Mbps with DAITA enabled, so yeah, the contrast is clear. It's disappointing — I liked them, but steady degradation and forum chatter pushed me to stop the auto‑renew.

I was messing with the app one evening while making dinner and suddenly everything clicked. The interface is clean and fast. I use it for family stuff — bills, recipes someone emails, school notes — and for switching the From-address when I reply, so people get the right email. At first I kept getting those banner promos and naggy pop-ups, which drove me nuts, and I still get some of them. But once I dialed in the settings it mostly stayed out of the way. The privacy features feel decent, which is a big deal for me, though I did get unwanted promo emails even after opting out — annoying. Customer support was slow when I needed help setting up a shared mailbox for my wife and I; that dragged on longer than I liked. Still, the core product does what I bought it for and that moment when everything synced and my wife could see the same threads — that’s when I knew I was satisfied. Not perfect. Some rough edges on support and marketing. But for daily family email management it’s become one of those apps I actually use every day.

not worth the hassle — I paid, the app kept nagging for more, and support shrugged. I bought a one‑year plan (1,299 CZK, around €52) because the interface looked promising and the server list seemed impressive — surprise: pretty dashboard, rubbish delivery. Connections were flaky from the start; some days it worked okay, other days it simply wouldn’t connect. Then the weird part: the app kept asking me to pay again even though I’d already bought the year. I cancelled through the Apple App Store like you’re supposed to, but my card still got hit. When I reached out to support I was basically told to take it up with my bank. That response felt like being handed a phone book and a shrug. I’ve had better luck with cheaper services that at least refunded me or fixed things fast, so this was especially disappointing. On the bright side, the app design is clean and the list of countries looked legit — so I was surprised by how badly the basics failed. I don’t like leaving angry rants, but this wasn’t just a glitch; it was poor follow‑through and zero ownership. If you value hassle‑free refunds and real support, I’d look elsewhere. If you enjoy pretty UIs and guessing whether your VPN will work today, maybe give it a shot, I guess. For me, it felt like paying for a promise that never showed up and then being told to figure it out myself.

better mobile search and a simple inbox split option.

I cancelled ProtonMail because I couldn’t rely on it for day-to-day work and they never actually gave me the refund I asked for. I’ll say up front that the experience left me frustrated and a little worn out, not angry so much as tired of repeating myself to different people who promised one thing and did another. I use email for work — client messages, invoices, password resets, everything — so reliability isn’t a nice-to-have for me, it’s essential. When the service failed multiple times to send or receive messages over months, I decided to cut ties and asked for my money back. That’s where the mess began. In October 2025 I asked to cancel and requested a refund. The first support person I chatted with offered “two extra months in credits” if I’d give them time to fix it. I said no — credits don’t help me if I can’t trust the mail arriving — and made it clear I wanted a refund and to be done. A different rep then replied saying they would “proceed with the downgrade.” That phrasing turned out to be key: what they meant by “downgrade” was actually applying those credits I’d already rejected, not processing a refund. I didn’t notice right away. Weeks went by and no money showed up, so I wrote back. From that point the whole thing became a loop. Multiple reps asked for various pieces of proof under the pretense that if I provided them they'd “reconsider the refund.” So I gathered logs, timestamps, screenshots, any trace of missed mail — I did the work. Each time I gave exactly what they asked for, only to be told later that they still couldn’t issue a refund because of their policy, or that the refund was only “at Proton’s discretion.” It felt like they were using the promise of a discretionary refund to get free troubleshooting from me. After more back-and-forth, a supervisor named Marija entered the thread. Instead of catching up on the existing emails, she had me explain the whole situation again. I said straight away that I wasn’t interested in troubleshooting if it wasn’t going to lead to an actual refund. I even asked for a neutral third party to be present before we continued, because at that point it felt like information I’d given was being ignored or lost on purpose. They kept emailing anyway. Then a new rep, Ivan, contacted me as if I’d asked to continue. He contradicted bits of what other reps had said and treated the conversation like it was my idea to keep going. I told them I felt harassed by the repeated outreach. It’s important to note that Proton refers to refunds as discretionary in their terms — fine — but that doesn’t excuse promising to “reconsider” and then never actually reconsidering after I jumped through the hoops they set up. The process wound up being this: they’d ask me to provide proof, I’d do it, and then they’d revert to saying they couldn’t issue a refund because their policy forbade it. So I ended up troubleshooting for free while they kept my money. I tried to stop the private back-and-forth and asked that any further contact happen only with a third-party involved. They ignored that request. I also pointed out legal and regulatory angles — they claim ties to European Commission standards and I mentioned US consumer laws since I’m in the States — but that didn’t change the behaviour. After things stalled I filed a chargeback with my credit card company and opened a complaint with the BBB; for context, they already had an “F” rating there. Later, in Feb, Proton’s business account asked me publicly to share my ticket number so they could “look into” my case. I declined. First, it’s poor practice to throw ticket numbers around online; second, I’d already explained that I won’t talk to them privately without a neutral intermediary. I told them to respond to the BBB instead. So yeah: the actual product did not meet my reliability needs, and the support experience felt deceptive — not just unhelpful, but structured in a way that made me do unpaid work for them while they sidestepped giving a refund. I use email for urgent client stuff and personal admin; losing that reliability had real consequences for my day-to-day. Emotionally, I felt dismissed, and that’s the part that sticks with me more than any single technical failure. I’d recommend being cautious: if you need dependable email and clear, final customer service outcomes, this experience suggested to me that ProtonMail wasn’t the right fit.

I was halfway through trying to watch something on HBO, thinking “okay, little buffer, whatever,” and then the playback just froze like my brain at 7 a.m. That was the first real clue. I’d signed up for Proton while living in Ho Chi Minh — VPN seemed sensible on VNPT ADSL — so I wasn’t expecting miracles, just that it wouldn’t wreck my connection. First impression? Hopeful but cautious. Interface was fine, privacy spiel was convincing, install was painless. Then I turned it on and everything went weird.
I ran the usual sanity checks because that’s what you do now, right? Baseline, VPN off: nPerf to Singapore — something like 950 Mbps down, 240 up, ping ~48 ms. Browsing felt snappy, streaming was smooth. Proton on, picking servers in Perth and Hanoi: Perth showed ~730 Mbps down but upload collapsed to 2–3 Mbps and ping ballooned to ~160 ms. Hanoi was worse — 180+ ms, upload strangled, streaming tests errored out or spiked to absurd values. Pages hung, logins timed out, web apps felt gluey. Same laptop, same cable (wired Cat5), same ISP. The only variable was the VPN toggle.
I went full detective: screenshots, side‑by‑side tests (VPN on vs off, different exit servers), streaming attempts, multiple nPerf runs. Sent it all to support. At first I thought they were helpful because someone answered quickly on the forum, but the actual support I got via tickets was slow and, honestly, boilerplate. Copy‑paste responses, long delays, and eventually a note saying “sorry, your 30‑day window is closed” when I asked for a refund — which felt cheeky since I’d been reporting the problem for weeks.
There’s a specific second I’ll never forget: I turned Proton off mid‑test, watched the latency drop to 48 ms and upload rocket back up, and a page that had been stuck loading just finished like nothing ever happened. That tiny instant — the switch, the immediate return to normal — was vindicating. Not because Proton fixed anything, but because I finally had proof for myself of what was happening. Satisfaction: I wasn’t satisfied with Proton; I was satisfied that I knew the cause and could act.
So I cancelled Proton (no dramatic refund, just the usual corporate shrug) and tried a competitor. Different provider, same machine, same ISP — and streaming worked, pages loaded, uploads weren’t strangled. Relief is underrated. The light scepticism that I’d had at signup flipped into outright relief: happy I’d tested, happy I’d documented it, happy I’d made the switch.
If you’re in Vietnam on VNPT and considering Proton, go in with your eyes open: it might install fine, and the privacy pitch is convincing, but test it under real‑world load. If you run into the slow‑upload/huge‑ping issue, screenshots help, but don’t hold your breath for miracles from support. In my case the best feeling was the simple one — turning something off and watching my internet come back to life. That’s when I knew I was done with Proton.