Is the Proton free tier still usable for anything real or is it a demo now

Been using the Proton free tier for panel logins for about three weeks and I keep seeing people here say it is basically a demo. Is it? Because it has worked for everything I have thrown at it so far!

Three locations, no card needed, no time limit that I have found. If the paid one is five bucks I will obviously just pay, but I want to know what the free one actually stops doing before I do.

The free tier is fine as a tier. Bandwidth and locations are the limits and neither of those is what should concern you.

Signup needs an email. That email is the identifier, and the whole point of the anonymous VPN category is that there is nothing to correlate. Swiss jurisdiction and a recurring no-logs audit are both real and both irrelevant to the question of what is sitting in the account record with your session times next to it.

If you used a throwaway address created from a clean network, you have most of what you wanted. If you used the address you use for everything, you have a VPN and no anonymity, and you should know which of those you bought.

Free tier is three country and slow. For torrent no, for login to panel is fine.

Anyway the thing that annoy me is not speed, is that free server are always full in evening. You connect, it drop, you connect again. For five dollar this problem go away completely.

Slow how? Everyone says slow and nobody ever says megabits.

Getting like 8 to 12 down on the NL free one!

One angle that has not come up: the Swiss position is genuinely different from the Icelandic or Panamanian claims that get thrown around in these threads, because there is actual case law behind it rather than a marketing page.

The company is a real Swiss entity with published accounts and a legal department, and it has litigated the scope of what it can be compelled to produce. That cuts both ways, of course; a company large enough to litigate is also a company large enough to be served properly, whereas the two-man shop nobody can find is not. But if your concern is a civil subpoena from another country rather than a criminal matter at home, the mainstream operator is not obviously the worse choice.

I appreciate that this is not the framing most people here start from.

An audit measures what it was scoped to measure on the day it was run, and you are reading a summary of it rather than the scope.

Nothing in that is an accusation. It is a statement about what an audit is. The company is fine. The mechanism you are relying on is weaker than the confidence people place in it, and the email is still the email.

pay the five euro. this thread has cost you more time than a year of it