We did ship internationally, and Canada was one of the top international destinations for our products.
268 karma · joined October 17, 2018
When you consider that we include a domain registration and offsite encrypted backups, our subscription pricing is fairly comparable.
If a customer doesn't want a subscription, they can still use the Helm on their local network and get access to all their data. Running without a subscription is not something we currently support because of a lot of variables that can prevent email from working consistently, creating a heavy support burden (which is costly) along with bad customer experiences. It's best for people wary of a subscription to go down the DIY path (and we end up with a lot of DIY switchers once they realize how much effort it is).
All data is accessible on local ports on the LAN, with or without the subscription service.
Google rate limiting and restricting access to your own data is pretty awful. They are similarly terrible about OAuth permissions for 3rd parties - some companies are allowed to export data on behalf of customers while others are not.
We use a verified boot process to ensure trusted bits are running on the HW.
> - Can we install stuff on this machine? How is the upgrade process working? Do we have root on the machine if need be?
Not yet - but we are planning for customers to be able to run their own services in the future. We have quite a few updates to do before we get there. The upgrades happen OTA, seamlessly in the background. There is no root access on the machine locally or remotely.
There are much cheaper ways to send spam effectively than using a Helm so we haven't seen real issues around this.
We prototyped on Pis a while back before we shipped our v1 but there are meaningful limitations.
We don't make the subscription optional at this time because the overwhelming majority of people on the Internet do not have a static IP address with a corresponding PTR record, which is required if you want to have deliverable email. There are other ways to handle domain registration, DNS and backups on your own, but we believe the subscription is a pretty great value for the convenience it provides.
No - we do not rent hardware. When people buy the server from us, they own it. Full stop. There are ongoing costs to make email at home work: a static IP address with good reputation, a security gateway, traffic, etc. If people don't want to pay us for those costs, they will pay them to an ISP and/or an infrastructure provider like AWS. The ease of setup and management comes from the integration of hardware, software and service.
> I am completely at the mercy of your original and continued good intentions as in addition to using your lock-in for a big price hike later you presumably can also snoop on my data.
This is true of any paid service you use right? They can increase your costs at any time. I'm not sure why you think there's something uniquely bad about us for this reason. We have pretty clear values around wanting to know as little about our customers as possible and designing our products end to end around that. We have worked pretty hard at reducing costs, bringing the server price down 60% while doubling its specifications. Our goal is to make this as cost effective and accessible as possible for everyone. We are not interested in locking in customers - it's easy for anyone to take their data off Helm and go to a server of their own making or another service of their choosing. That's not hypothetical - like any company, we have churned customers and supported them in their migration off our product. It's easy to sling these hypotheticals you are concocting but they are not borne out of any reality.
> As far as I can tell there is no really substantial trust differentiator to protonmail.
There is actually a substantial difference. Protonmail holds your data on their servers and therefore can turn it over without a warrant. Well it's encrypted, right? So what could any entity do with that data? Well, Protonmail may be compelled to modify their service to intercept the password on login to decrypt your inbox and turn it over to a government authority (if you don't think that can happen, see what the German government did to Tutanota).
We aren't in a position to do that. Even if the US government came with a court order for your encrypted backups from us, we don't have access to the keys to decrypt them. If we were asked to make firmware changes, we would be retracing the steps of the FBI/Apple San Bernardino case and would enlist the help of the EFF, ACLU and others to fight. I personally believe the case law is pretty clear that they wouldn't win, which is partly why the FBI relented earlier.
> that you can remotely update anytime you feel like it
You make this sound like a terrible thing but really it's not. It allows us to keep our products patched and secured over time.
> In what ways is that better than running an IMAP client on my laptop and using it to send data via protonmail, using my own domain, and keeping offline copies of everything (with a periodic upload to backblaze or some other e2e encrypted backup solution)?
I didn't say people couldn't roll their own solutions. Sure they can - it's just more work, hassle and fragile. And I already covered the tradeoffs of keeping that data in the cloud. Protonmail has access to all your email in the clear (inbound and outbound). We do not and anyone running a server at home would have similar privacy. That's a clear difference.
> Accessing the data is not enough because what you are selling me is not an overpriced and unergonomic hard drive. You are selling me the ability to send, receive and store email (and likely more).
Actually it is because we were talking about data ownership. Your specific dig was about how "own your data" was in any way true ("or that "own your data" is in any meaningful way true" in your parent post).
Data from Helm is accessible using IMAP, SMTP, CardDAV, CalDAV, WebDAV on the local network (without requiring our service). You own the device, you own the data. There is a standards-based way of accessing that data just as there is with the hard drive from Best Buy.
If you want to self-host email, you need a trustworthy static IP address with reverse DNS. It's considerably more expensive to get this from an ISP. Our annual fee also includes storage for offsite backups. You don't get the same privacy assurances using Protonmail as you do with self-hosting either. For example, Protonmail is privy to the content of all outbound email messages in the clear unless you are communicating with the recipient using E2EE.
From a cost perspective, Helm V2 starts at $199 for 256GB of storage. First year costs, including subscription work out to $298. With Protonmail, their entry level plan with added storage at the same price buys you an inbox with about 28GB, a small fraction of what you would get with Helm storage-wise, not to mention we don't limit users, email addresses, domains, etc.