Protonmail If you upgrade once, Protonmail will lock your emails permanently unless you continue paying for the rest of your life - even if you upgraded for 1 month from free! No other email service does that. They will not even let you access past emails you got on the free plan. Ransom scam. Wilmington Delaware

The worst part is, they have an extremely efficient team of internet scrubbers deleting any mention of this, that's why I'm here. Posted in two seperate forums, deleted within 5minutes each time. Massive, massive online shilling campaign as far as I can tell, both times the moderaters gave no excuse.

If you upgrade once, even just paying for a single month (it's about $10 per month iirc) and you've been using the free version for years, once the month runs out your account will be locked, and you'll be forced to pay to continue to use the pay plan to do so much as even look at your past emails. 

Let's be clear - other email providers seem to have no problem allowing paid features when you upgrade, and then at the end of the upgrade you paid for it reverts back to free. This is the first time I've ever heard of punishing people who decide to temporarily upgrade like this.

Protonmail permanently revokes all access to your emails if you upgrade from a free plan to a paid plan, and then let the paid plan expire. This includes emails you received on the free plan, everything, absolutely no way to access them. The moment you pay once, you're required to pay 50 euros a year (on the cheapest plan,) even if you just want to keep the email around for storage. 

Imagine this:

You're in a foreign country, and you're mugged. Wallet, phone, keys, etc - all gone. You go back to the hotel, thankfully they have a computer you can use. You log into your email, confident you'll at least be able to tell everyone about the situation and get help, but you're locked out of your email, and it's 50 euros to unlock it. Panicking, you figure you'll start by calling your bank, and telling them to cancel the old cards and send you the new one straight away, perhaps they can overnight it. You call them up, they ask verification info. You don't have your card # memorized, so you go to your online banking to get your account number, but it needs 2FA log in - to your email. Since they can't send you a new card without you answering the basic verification, they "Sorry sir" and hang up. In a brilliant stroke of luck you remember your wife's phone number even though you haven't dialed a number out for years thanks to contacts, and she actually picks up even though it's nighttime there. You signed up for Western Union before you left in case of an emergency like this. She sends you western union straight away, and the confirmation is sent - to your email. She tries to make you a new account but since a person with these details already exist, a second account can't be made, and you have no ID and no email confirmation with no chance of another account.

This is pure predatory behaviour, ransomware baked into the system.

Please note - there is absolutely no mention at all when you decide to try the premium features, that it's a permenant change and you'd instantly be ceding over ownership of the emails for an entire lifetime to protonmail unless you pay up. It's a free service with optional upgrades, no customer on earth would expect if you get a month or a year upgrade that it would hold your emails ransom once the time runs out, every other email provider I know of just reverts you back to the free version!

Email is so important, it's way more important than any other online service, and the results can be devastating if this company is allowed to prey on people like this.