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Comment by valevk | Hacker News Reader

Switched to proton, never looked back

I'm also a happy proton user for my one-person business. I want to switch with the personal stuff as well but I just find the family plan so expensive [0] compared to alternatives. I also don't like that you get 6 users, you almost always have too many or you have too little (what family is exactly 6 anyway?). Why so rigid?

My kids are young, they just need an inbox, nothing more.

Ah well, I guess sooner of later I will switch, it's just such a nice product + I share the 3 TB with less than 6 so I do benefit, it would be more than enough for all our pics/videos to date... But then how to rsync from our Linux server ;) (I bet it's coming and I am slowly getting fed up with playing NextCloud sys-admin for the family, it was a hobby but starting to feel as a chore as of late...)

Also, I guess switching from mail plus to family will allow me to have my business email within the family (as custom mailbox with it's own domain).

I would have switched years ago if it was like 10/month for the family (or like 2 per actual family member + some base fee). But I guess the storage and VPN are nice. (But hey that tailscale + Mullvad is so elegant...)

Choices choices...

[0] https://proton.me/family

Fastmail for me, but yeah same. I did that a long time ago -- the only thing I use still is search and youtube. The latter of which has no real replacement sadly

Kagi is a great replacement for search. Agree about Youtube having no replacement for now.

I also use Kagi and I really enjoy it (enough to pay for the ultimate subscription), but it's hard for me to recommend to someone wanting to "degoogle" their life. Kagi search results depend (probably a lot) on the Google search API. If Google rug pulled that, Kagi search results would definitely be effected.

99% of my searches are on DDG and it's my default browser (on iOS), I'm pretty happy with it.

What do you do for calendar? Docs? Files? Maps? Photos?

I would say Photos is the only difficult ones.

Docs can be handled locally or via any other online office suite. Files can be stored anywhere, from local NAS to other remote storage services, Calendar is easily exported and imported somwhere else or locally. And maps can be used without account so you don't really need to export anything.

Apples apps for all of those; work is Google Docs because I don't get a choice

Not the parent, but also degoogled as much as pragmatic lately.

For files and photos, I use an NAS in my home (Synology). Works pretty smooth with automated photo backup etc. For office stuff I just use Libre Office, I don't need collaboration features. Not interested in cloud options personally, so sorry if that's not helpful. I'd probably go for Dropbox for most of this if I was.

Google Maps is, for me, unfortunately one of the services I wasn't able to replace yet. I tried to use OSM (also for navigating), which actually worked great for me. But I use satellite view so often (mostly for entertainment) that I couldn't quite break the Maps habit.

I don't use Proton but don't they offer a calendar and file storage? I know a lot of email providers do (I use mailbox.org and they do). Personally I host Nextcloud on a VPS and use that for file storage, calendar and photos.

Maps is a tough one. It's probably the main Google service I still use (YouTube being another one). There is OSM of course but it can't compete with Google on features.

Fastmail's hosted calendar is good, and the file storage allows for file storage. Happy customer here.

Indeed, we do offer both: https://proton.me/calendar and https://proton.me/drive.

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