Proton Partners Program - Reviews and experiences

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.