ProtonMail has unveiled its latest initiative to make its encrypted email services available to the masses, as the Swiss startup quietly rolled out a new Professional subscription tier aimed at businesses.
ProtonMail was founded out of CERN in 2013, and after a period in beta the company launched its service globally last March, with the promise of client-side encryption for all. Since then, the company has been turbo-charging its service with two-factor authentication (2FA) and Tor support, while as of June this year ProtonMail also offers its very own virtual private network (VPN) service.
Thus far, ProtonMail has offered a free tier with limitations such as just 500MB of storage, while the Plus and Visionary plans — costing up to $ 5 and $ 30 a month respectively — offer extra features such as more storage, additional email addresses, and custom domains. Now, with the new Professional tier, ProtonMail has tailored its pricing and feature-set specifically with businesses in mind.
On the surface, there isn’t a great deal of difference between Professional and Visionary in terms of features — they each offer custom domains, unlimited folders, labels, email filters, autoresponder, and more. But digging down into the details reveals some notable new tools.
Above: ProtonMail: Pricing & tiers
Rather than relying on employees to set up their own email addresses, ProtonMail Professional lets companies set up individual user accounts for anyone in the company from a central hub that’s managed by assigned administrators. From within this hub, admins can create and delete accounts, reset passwords, re-allocate storage space, and more.
This, according to the company, has been an oft-requested feature. “ProtonMail Professional brings with it a much demanded feature that a lot of people from the ProtonMail community have been asking for since the very beginning,” the company said in a blog post.
It’s worth noting that many companies may be reluctant to ditch their existing email subscriptions to the likes of Google due to the myriad additional services they gain such as shared calendars and cloud productivity tools, and G Suite only costs between $ 5 and $ 25 per month per user for everything. ProtonMail Professional costs $ 8 / month per user when billed monthly, or $ 6.25 / month per user when paid annually, but with privacy a growing concern in the business realm, some companies may consider the switch.
Then there’s the issue of data migration. Companies will probably want to shift all their existing email data over to ProtonMail, but ProtonMail doesn’t yet offer the tools to enable this, so organizations will be on their own on that front for now. ProtonMail does say that it’s looking to release migration tools some time in 2018.
