The whole "freemium" model seems pretty screwed up
I struggle to understand how the companies price this.
Even the more trustworthy ones seem to not understand about use cases and costs.
Proton is a prime example. I use the free email and vpn. I'd happily pay a small amount for a slightly better version with email client support ( and maybe calender sharing and even a local VPN, which isn't even in the cheapest paid tier btw).
But not around £50 a year for 10 mostly unneeded email addresses an unneeded extra 15Gb of storage, 24 unneeded calendars.
In general, almost none of the paid for content in the majority of freemium offerings are of any use to me and I can't justify the costs. Especially when there are so many of them. I'd be paying hundreds of quid a year for almost no extra value.
It feels very like the business model that would rather have ten thousand customers each giving £100 profit a year than half a million each averaging £10 profit a year.