Separating my eggs from the same basket

Following the recent controversy with Proton Mail, I decided to take a step back and rethink whether I want to stay with their suite of services going forward. Not withstanding the CEO's behavior or the executives prioritizing releasing half baked features over refining existing ones, I find their current products lacking, or in a way, feels unfinished.

I decided to go my own way again, then. There are actually a few services I use that Proton offers. Namely, Mail, VPN, Pass (and Simplelogin, the email alias service), as well as Drive.

For Drive, I already bought Koofr's 1TB lifetime storage. I know it's going to vanish someday, but I did my backups, and will transist to using Cryptomator with Google Drive, or pcloud, or Tresorit if Koofr ever goes out of if business.

For Pass, I already am using Bitwarden. I tried to switch to using Proton Pass because not long ago Proton Pass finally added the folders feature we all desperately wanted to categorize entries. But I found the autofill detection is still not 100% working for the websites I visited. My Pass Premium subscription came in turn with my Simplelogin Premium subscription, I grandfathered a 50% off discount I applied for when I was still working at a secondary school. But I think I am not going to renew it next year as I am trying another mail provider who also let me create unlimited mail aliases.

For VPN, this is a huge deal. I am now using VPN 90% of the time whenever and wherever I access the internet. I need a robust VPN provider that can handle large volume of traffic, is stable both in terms of their apps and their services. I tried a lot of VPN services, including Adguard VPN, Windscribe VPN, IVPN, Mullvad VPN, Proton VPN. In the end I found the most stable and feature rich of the bunch are Mullvad and Proton. Adguard VPN is just garbage and their mobile app crashes very often. Windscribe is a bit better, but their server also become unavailable sometimes, and latency isn't the best. IVPN is worse than Windscribe sometimes, but per my testing, they are also the least blocked, likely because they are not as well-known. Mullvad's connections are very stable, but has fewer servers. Their apps are great though, and rarely if ever let me down. Proton is close, but I found out their Linux desktop app and Android app both have flaws I am unwilling to look past. The Android app only uses Always-on VPN setting to stay alive, and I found that inadequate, the app will be killed sometimes. Gonna do some more tests.

Onto Mail, it's a tough one. Of all the mail service providers that claim to be private, Proton is actually the one doing things mostly right. It checks all the boxes for me: fast and modern UI/UX, offers end-to-end and at-rest encryption, reasonably priced, does not sell my data, has reliable spam detection. Now that I think of it, my daily email exchange are not usually end to end encrypted since none of my recipients use it. That leaves me at-rest encryption to still be relevant, and I have to take the provider's word for it to not peer into my emails as they came in no matter which one I'm using. I was in the process of moving Tuta to Proton, I kept using Tuta on and off the last few years. Tuta is just... Okay, but unreliable, and new features came too slow. The Tuta webapp was massively slow to load, the emails often fail to load at first. It still is slow, but faster than it used to be. Their calendar app do not integrate with Android (while contacts do). I tried Mailbox a year or two ago as well. Roughly the same issue as Tuta, but their webapp was even more dated and slow. They updated the web experience last year though, and it was blazingly fast. Still, I found the webapp difficult to navigate, PGP implementation confusing, and the feature/price isn't very good. I'm now experimenting with Fastmail, they do not offer end to end encrypted encryption, only at-rest. But everything else is up to my standard, good UI/UX, allows me to use my own mail client, has unlimited aliases for paying customer, etc.

Why don't I self-host you say? The cost and effort is too high for me to host all these services myself. They maybe easy to setup, but to continuously maintain the infrastructure and security, it is just not worth the effort. I'd rather have someone else manage them for me.

TL;DR: I am reconsidering which internet services I'll be using going forward. I decided at last to keep using my current cloud storage. Storing my passwords with Bitwarden. Unsure about VPN. Trying Fastmail out before committing.