Bobby Wilson
Proton Unlimited bundles Proton’s full suite for about twice the price of Mail Plus. It is worth it if you will genuinely use several services, and poor value if you only want email. I use Mail, VPN, Pass and Drive, so the plan makes financial sense for me.
What you get with Proton Unlimited
Proton Unlimited combines Proton’s paid email, VPN, password manager, cloud storage, calendar and Bitcoin wallet in one subscription.
The plan costs approximately:
| Billing | Cost |
|---|---|
| Monthly | $12.99 / £10.39 / €12.99 a month |
| Yearly | $119.88 / £95.88 / €119.88 billed once (works out at $9.99 / £7.99 / €9.99 a month) |
The yearly plan is charged as a single payment for the whole year, not month by month. It works out cheaper per month than paying monthly, but you pay the full amount upfront. It comes to roughly twice the price of Proton Mail Plus, and any introductory discount renews at this standard rate afterwards, so the renewal price matters more than the opening one. Proton’s full plan pricing breaks down every tier and what each renews at.
If you sign up through the link above, you get 30% off your first term of Proton Unlimited. After that first term it renews at the standard price shown above, so it is a saving to start rather than a permanently lower rate.
The plan includes:
- 500 GB of storage
- 15 email addresses
- 3 custom email domains
- Unlimited hide-my-email aliases
- Proton Sentinel advanced account protection
- The full paid versions of Proton VPN, Pass, Drive, Calendar and Wallet
A hide-my-email alias is an alternative address that forwards to your main inbox without revealing the one you normally use, handy for signing up to things you do not fully trust.
This is a large bundle, but the number of included services is not enough to make it good value by itself. The real question is how many of them you will actually use.
The services I actually use
I use four parts of Proton Unlimited: Mail, VPN, Pass and Drive. Those four services are the reason I continue paying for the plan.
Proton Mail
Proton Mail is my main email service and the foundation of the bundle for me.
The email encryption is the same across Proton’s plans. Paying for Unlimited does not give the messages themselves a special form of encryption that cheaper Proton plans lack. What Unlimited adds is more storage, more addresses, more custom domains and access to the rest of the Proton suite.
I already pay for and use Proton Mail, so the decision is not whether email alone justifies Unlimited. It is whether adding the other services makes the higher price worthwhile. For me, it does.
Proton VPN
I tested Proton VPN on my own internet connection to see how much speed I lost when connecting to servers at different distances. These results reflect one connection, on one day, using my own equipment. They should not be treated as a guarantee of the speeds another person will receive.
My connection without the VPN was 136.57 Mbps down and 20.93 Mbps up. I then tested servers in Manchester, Boston and Bucharest.
| Server | Download | Ping |
|---|---|---|
| No VPN (baseline) | 136.57 Mbps | 23 ms |
| Manchester, UK | ~127-129 Mbps | 33-36 ms |
| Boston, USA | ~125-128 Mbps | ~100 ms |
| Bucharest, Romania | ~129 Mbps | ~94-101 ms |
The download speed stayed between roughly 125 and 129 Mbps across all three locations. Compared with the 136.57 Mbps baseline, that was a drop of about 5 to 8%.
That is a good result. Every VPN slows your connection a little, because your traffic is being routed through another server first, and how much depends on the server, the distance and the time of day. A five to eight per cent drop is about as good as it gets.
The clearer difference was latency, shown as ping. The Manchester server produced a ping of around 33 to 36 milliseconds. The more distant Boston and Bucharest servers were closer to 100 milliseconds. That increase is expected when data has further to travel. It did not affect normal browsing or video streaming during my testing, but higher latency could matter more for activities where immediate response times are important.
For how I use a VPN, the practical result was straightforward. Browsing felt normal and video streamed without a noticeable problem on every server I tested. The download speed remained close to my normal connection speed, while the ping increased with distance.
Proton Pass
A password manager stores your login details and fills them in when you sign in to websites and apps.
I have used Proton Pass for years across my tablet, phone and PC. My passwords have synced reliably between the three devices, and autofill works most of the time when I sign in or complete forms.
There is an occasional flaw. Mostly on my tablet, and sometimes on my PC, the Proton Pass prompt does not appear when I click inside a login or form field. Refreshing the page normally fixes it. This does not happen often enough to make the service unreliable, but it is noticeable when it happens. A password manager is supposed to remove friction from signing in, so an autofill prompt that occasionally fails to appear is a genuine weakness.
Even with that problem, Proton Pass has worked well for me overall. My passwords remain available across my devices, new logins sync properly, and autofill usually appears when expected. It also fits naturally with the hide-my-email aliases included with Unlimited: I can create an alternative email address for an account while keeping the login details stored in the same service.
Proton Drive
I use Proton Drive to store the images from my websites.
My experience has been simple. I uploaded images from my tablet, and they were properly synced and available when I opened Proton Drive on my PC. It is a drive. I click to upload, the files appear on my other device, and that is the end of it. I do not have much more to say about it, which is really the point. Cloud storage should just work quietly in the background, and for how I use it, Proton Drive does.
The parts I do not really use
Proton Unlimited also includes Proton Calendar and Proton Wallet.
Proton Calendar is an encrypted calendar included with the subscription. I do not personally rely on it, so I am not going to pretend to offer an in-depth verdict on how it compares with other calendars.
Proton Wallet is Proton’s Bitcoin wallet. It is included in the plan, but it is not a service I personally use enough to review properly.
Both are part of the bundle and may add value for someone who needs them. They do not affect my own decision to pay for Unlimited. My verdict is based on the four services I genuinely use, not on counting every included product as equally valuable.
Is Proton Unlimited worth it?
Proton Unlimited is worth it when it replaces several subscriptions you would otherwise pay for separately.
A standalone VPN typically costs around $3 to $5 per month. A password manager is usually in a similar range. Private email and cloud storage are then separate costs on top. The exact total depends on the services and billing periods chosen, but someone paying separately for all four could easily spend more than the cost of Proton Unlimited.
That is the calculation that matters in my case. I would otherwise need a private email service, a VPN, a password manager and cloud storage. I actively use all four through Proton Unlimited. Even at the standard renewal price, paying for one bundle makes more sense for me than maintaining four separate subscriptions.
There is also a practical benefit to having them under one account. I do not need to manage four billing dates or four separate providers. That convenience alone would not justify paying more, but it matters when the bundle already costs less than the services it replaces.
It would be easy to overstate the value by counting every included service as money saved, but I do not use Proton Calendar or Proton Wallet enough to count them. They are included, but I would not otherwise be paying for separate replacements. Their theoretical value does not reduce my real monthly costs. Mail, VPN, Pass and Drive do.
That is why Proton Unlimited is well worth the cost for me, even after an introductory offer ends. I am not paying more for a large list of products that sit unused. I am paying once for four services that I genuinely use.
The same calculation can produce the opposite answer for someone else. If you only want private email, Unlimited is difficult to justify. You would be paying roughly twice the price of Mail Plus for a VPN, password manager and cloud storage you do not need. It is also less convincing if you already have a VPN or password manager you like. Replacing a service that works well just to make a bundle appear cheaper does not create a real saving.
Who should get it, and who should not?
Proton Unlimited makes sense for someone who wants private email and expects to use several other Proton services. It is particularly easy to justify when you would otherwise pay separately for a VPN, password manager and cloud storage. Using four parts of the suite turns it into a genuine bundle rather than an expensive way to upgrade your email.
It may also suit someone who wants to keep these services under one provider instead of managing several subscriptions. That is useful, but it should remain a secondary consideration. The services still need to meet your needs.
You probably should not get Proton Unlimited if email is the only part you care about. Mail Plus gives you paid Proton Mail without charging you for the full suite. A cheaper provider may suit you better if price matters more than having everything connected. Tuta gives you private, encrypted email for less, without the wider suite you would be paying for here.
Unlimited is also harder to justify if you already pay for a VPN, password manager or cloud storage service that you are happy with. It only saves money when it replaces those costs.
My honest verdict is that Proton Unlimited is well worth it for me. I use Proton Mail as my main email, Proton VPN performs well on my connection, Proton Pass keeps my passwords synced across my devices, and Proton Drive stores my website images without friction. That remains true at the renewal price, not just during an introductory offer. So if this would also fit your use case i can more than recommend you sign up for Proton Unlimited
The verdict depends entirely on usage. Use several parts of the suite and Unlimited can cost less than buying them separately. Use only the email service and it becomes an expensive way to pay for products you will not touch.