Is it just me or is protonmail aggressively pushing the premium subscription?

If I am not mistaken, there is a "don't show me this offer again" thingy somewhere.

But as others have mentioned, it is a free service. And most importantly, this free service does not collect your data or show targrted ads to make a profit off of you when you don't pay. It is truly free. I think being asked to pay for the service is extra okay because of this.

That's totally understandable. I simply didn't notice that thing before due to some external factors, hence the question.

If you're on a free plan, doesn't it make sense for them to push their paid plans to you? They don't sell your data so they need to make money somehow.

Clicking the X on a free service is too expensive!

They always do. What annoys me is their Black Friday "deal" is almost the same price as paying for a 2 year subscription.

I didn't know there was a way to get a subscription that lasts 2 years! I see I can access that by clicking "Edit billing cycle" at https://account.proton.me/u/0/mail/dashboard

I'll definitely check that out when there aren't many remaining days for my current subscription.
Oh, I guess I didn't notice this before somehow. I don't know about other users, but it only turns me off. For a non-profit organization, they employ some of the worst marketing strategies.
- Buy a subscription and it all goes away!
Why is that a bad thing?

Being bound to 12 months is obviously better than 24 months if the price is the same.
- During their Black Friday deals, Proton claims 30% off. What they don't make clear is that's 30% off their monthly price.

I wouldn't know, I've had a paid proton account for a long time now

That's like responding with, "I don't know, I bought it as a gift," to Amazon product questions.
- It costs money to maintain all this stuff. They're being super generous with their free options.
  
  Then there's all the court cases that they fight against on the regular too. That costs a lot of money as well.

It's just you being hypersensitive to a service asking its users to pay for that service.

If anything, this reply shows how normalized these practices are.
- Not really. Them not using ads means they can't make money that way, so the only way they can make money is through subscriptions. Even a not for profit needs to pay people and pay for overhead. If everybody used the free service they would go under over night. As long as they continue to respect privacy they have every right to have these pop-ups. Especially since they don't force you to subscribe.
- And for a damn good reason... Companies need money to operate. Proton may not be for profit like Google, but they are not a charity either.
  
  Very little is free without strings, what's been normalized (in a bad way) is the concept that you can have free things that don't intrude asking for money. That only happens in the venture capital "get em hooked" stage (and we've seen a lot of it because the Internet is still relatively young). Even KDE is now asking for money (granted once a year ... but your usage of their desktop doesn't require them to run expensive servers).
- If anything, this reply shows how entitled some people are.

The advertising is the worst thing about Proton. I've made them aware of this several times but it just keeps getting worse. They started putting ads in the VPN app now.

As far as I'm concerned, as a paying customer I shouldn't be subjected to ads but, what're ya gonna do?

I'm paid and have never seen an ad. Are you on an oddball subscription?
- I just got it again. Note how Unlimited is grayed out, because that's the subscription I already have. Also note the "ProtonVPN" at the top. This is a nearly full screen ad that just popped up when I opened the app.
- I have no idea what that means. I have unlimited.
There are ads in the VPN app? I have never seen an ad on any Proton service, except for occasional emails or banners around upgrading my subscription.

Then again, I’ve been a premium subscriber for a while now.
- Yes there are. I just saw an ad for their new Duo subscription in a pop-up when it started up.
Also have not seen ads in the VPN, I have a paid subscription (just to the VPN, no other proton services yet)
- Ah well if you haven't personally seen them they must be a figment of my imagination!

I pay for a low tier and use uBlock to hide the buttons advertising higher tiers.

Same

I got a subscription last year and I don't have a memory of seeing an advertisement at https://mail.proton.me/u/0/inbox after that, and I didn't see one just now when I checked.

If you want to use an email service without seeing advertisements, maybe you should pay for a subscription starting from https://proton.me/pricing or https://www.privacyguides.org/en/email/ or maybe instead you should consider something like https://www.lifewire.com/best-free-email-accounts-1356641