For context, I’m in the States.
I already have a Tuta mail account so I figure for mail/calendar/soon-drive I’ll stick to them but what about other services?
Ideally I can try with a free tier before committing. iOS and Android and Linux are the platforms used in my household.
Still looking for:
- password manager
- vpn
- authenticator
- less important: docs/sheets
I was all in on proton services because it was easy for my family to switch from google and still have all these services in one place but now I’m more open to spreading these services out to more than one provider in case any of them shit the bed so to speak.
Thanks!
edit:
- probably staying with proton’s authenticator
- I’m sure most here won’t agree but my entire household uses firefox on desktop/mobile and my wife and I just decided to use firefox’s built in pw manager + sync for pw management. Please understand that convenience is top of mind for us tbh, out lives are too busy to be overly concerned with what to choose here.
- waiting for tuta drive to start using that but backed up out drives to a couple external drives and will just use that until tuta drive is released.
- vpn is still tbd
-
Password manager - Bitwarden (for now). They might enshittify soon because of their new CEO, but for now the technology is good.
-
VPN - IVPN. I was a previous Mullvad user. They were great, but you’re probably already aware of their own controversy. Not free obviously, and you probably know a free VPN is a bad idea.
-
Authenticator - Ente is free and with cloud backups.
What are the pros of IVPN over Mullvad, other than the controversy?
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I’m happy with Proton for the sole reason they aren’t Google. I don’t trust them completely, but I trust them more than I trust Google, and that’s all that matters. This doesn’t answer your question, but I thought I’d throw my opinion out there.
this was my take after the last drama with the CEO but this was enough for me to not want to give them money anymore.
I may continue to use one of their free services like the authenticator though since I don’t love my other options and I just don’t want to give them money. I’m not even a huge privacy person, just, like you, wanted to leave google behind.
Honestly if there’s one service you should be able to self host effortlessly it’s email. Email is basically your identity on the internet, but it’s so, so hard. Yes yes you can spin up an SMTP server pretty simply, but good luck getting anything past your ISP and into literally anyone else’s inbox.

