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Proton Unlimited Pricing 2026: Free vs Plus vs the Bundle, and Whether It Actually Saves You Money
If you are a solo operator or small team already paying for a VPN, a password manager, and cloud storage as three separate line items, Proton Unlimited at $9.99/mo billed annually is the pick, because it rolls all three plus private email and a 500 GB encrypted Drive into one bill for about what you already spend. Running a team that wants to leave Google Workspace without handing Google your files? The tier to look at is Workspace Standard at $12.99 per seat, the current low-price full-suite option among the big three (per valydex, July 2026).
That is the whole decision in two sentences. The rest of this piece shows the math behind each one, walks every tier so you can see where your wallet lands, and is candid about the one place Proton still loses to Google.
What is actually in the Proton ecosystem
Proton is not a single app. It is a bundle of privacy-first services that share one login and one encrypted account: Proton Mail, Calendar, Drive (encrypted cloud storage), VPN, Pass (a password manager), Wallet, and Lumo, its encrypted AI assistant. On the personal side, the free tier gives you a taste of Mail and Drive; Mail Plus adds real email headroom; and Proton Unlimited is the everything bundle, packing the paid tier of every one of those apps into a single $9.99/mo subscription (per Proton's plan comparison, fetched July 7, 2026).
The business side is a separate product line called Proton Workspace, launched as a direct Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 alternative. Workspace adds business email on your own domain, an admin console, per-seat storage, and Proton Meet for encrypted video calls (per Proton for Business docs, fetched July 7, 2026). One account, end-to-end encryption across the stack, and no cross-service ad profile. That is the pitch.
The plans, priced and dated
Every price below is the monthly rate on annual billing, the number Proton shows by default. Personal figures come from Proton's plan comparison page and costbench's Proton breakdown; business figures from valydex and Proton for Business, all fetched July 7, 2026.
| Plan | Monthly cost, billed annually (Proton, valydex) | Storage | Key features | Who it fits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1 GB | 1 email address, basic Mail and Drive, free VPN with limited servers | Testing the waters, or a light secondary inbox |
| Mail Plus | $3.99 | 15 GB | 10 addresses, 1 custom domain, full Mail and Calendar | You want private email on your own domain and nothing else |
| Proton Unlimited | $9.99 | 500 GB | 15 addresses, 3 custom domains, Plus tier of Mail, Calendar, Drive, Pass, VPN, Wallet, plus Lumo | A solo operator replacing a VPN plus password manager plus storage stack |
| Duo | $14.99 | 1 TB shared | Everything in Unlimited for 2 users | A couple or a two-person shop sharing one bill |
| Family | $23.99 | 3 TB shared | Everything in Unlimited for up to 6 users | A household or a small founding team of up to six |
| Workspace Standard | $12.99 / seat | 1 TB / user | Up to 15 custom domains, VPN, Pass, Proton Meet (100 participants) | A team leaving Google Workspace, no AI requirement |
| Workspace Premium | $24.99 / seat | 3 TB / user | Up to 20 domains, 250-participant meetings, data-retention controls, Lumo AI, Scribe | A team that wants private AI baked into the suite |
Two rows carry a footnote. Workspace Standard does not include Lumo AI (per valydex, July 2026); if private AI is the reason you are here, that is a Premium-only feature and it is worth naming up front so nobody buys the wrong tier. And note the title of this article says "$9.99 bundle," not a Premium number you might have seen quoted elsewhere. Some older writeups list Workspace Premium at $19.99. The current figure is $24.99 per seat (same valydex source). Pricing is the most-searched, most-stale fact in this whole category, so check the date on anything you read, including this.
Workspace tiers carry a 14-day free trial and no minimum seat count, so a two-person team pays for exactly two seats (per Proton for Business, fetched July 7, 2026).
A quick note on the three plans people most often confuse. Mail Plus is email only; it does not include the VPN or the password manager, so do not buy it expecting the bundle. Duo and Family exist for one reason: they are Unlimited stretched across more people, at 1 TB shared for two and 3 TB shared for up to six respectively (per Proton's plan comparison, fetched July 7, 2026). Two-person shop? Duo at $14.99 total beats two individual Unlimited seats at $9.99 each, which makes it the value pick for pairs. Family only makes sense once you are past three people who each want the full stack.
The bundle math: does the Unlimited bundle actually save you money
Here is where Unlimited earns its keep. The case is simple: if you are already paying separately for the three things Unlimited includes, you are not spending more to switch, you are spending roughly the same and getting private email plus 500 GB of encrypted storage and Lumo thrown in (per Proton's plan comparison, fetched July 7, 2026).
Example (illustrative competitor prices, not sourced quotes): a solo developer paying separately for a consumer VPN at ~$5/mo, a standalone password manager at ~$3/mo, and 200 GB of cloud storage at ~$3/mo is already spending roughly $11/mo across three invoices. Proton Unlimited at $9.99/mo (per Proton's plan comparison, fetched July 7, 2026) folds all three into one bill, bumps storage from 200 GB to 500 GB, and adds private email plus Lumo on top. The math closes at the first renewal.
Those competitor numbers are a rough sketch of a common stack, not measured prices. Your exact spend depends on which VPN and manager you run. The point holds across most combinations: three privacy tools bought a la carte tend to land near or above $10/mo, which is the price of the Unlimited bundle that replaces all three ($9.99/mo, per Proton, fetched July 7, 2026). If you are only paying for one of the three, the calculus flips and a single-service plan like Proton VPN or Proton Pass on its own may be the smarter buy. Unlimited wins when you are consolidating, not when you need one thing.
The candid con: Unlimited's 500 GB (per Proton, fetched July 7, 2026) is generous for email and documents but tight if you are backing up a photo library or video projects. Heavy storage users will feel the ceiling, and that is when Duo (1 TB) or a look at Proton Drive usage over a month becomes the real question rather than which bundle to pick.
Lumo 2.0: the private AI in the box
Lumo is the piece that makes this interesting for anyone running AI queries against sensitive material. Lumo 2.0 shipped June 30, 2026, and the jump is real: the Lite version scores 127% higher and the Max version 240% higher on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index than its predecessor, and it responds up to 76% faster than Lumo 1.4 (per Proton's Lumo 2.0 announcement, June 30, 2026). It is multimodal now, with image generation, editing, analysis, and sketch-to-image, plus web search with live results and source citations, user-controlled memory, a doubled context window, and Projects, which are dedicated encrypted workspaces (same source).
The privacy model is the whole reason it exists. Lumo runs on fully European infrastructure under Swiss privacy law, with zero-access encryption, no conversation logging, no training on your data, and a fully open-source client (per Proton, June 30, 2026). Paste client contracts, internal docs, or anything that must never surface in a training set into a chatbot, and that posture is the differentiator. No other major AI chat product offers it.
Now the honesty, because this is the part that decides whether Lumo is right for you. On raw reasoning depth, Lumo is less capable than the frontier models: Gemini, GPT, and Claude will out-think it on hard problems. Its edge is privacy, not horsepower. Treat it as the assistant you point at data you cannot send anywhere else, not as a wholesale ChatGPT replacement. Buy Unlimited for Lumo if privacy is your constraint; keep your frontier model of choice for the heavy reasoning.
Proton Workspace vs Google: the honest split
The case for Workspace over Google is three sentences. Your files, email, and calendar are end-to-end encrypted, so client data never sits readable on a US hyperscaler's servers. After Microsoft's July 2026 price increase, Workspace Standard is the lowest-priced full-suite option among Proton, Google, and Microsoft (per valydex, July 2026), so the privacy upgrade does not cost a premium. And if your team has already moved off Google Docs on principle, moving email onto the same encrypted account finishes the migration instead of leaving a Gmail-shaped hole.
Where Google still wins, plainly: Sheets and Docs are deeper and more mature than Proton's document tooling, Gemini is a stronger AI than Lumo on capability, and the Google ecosystem of third-party integrations is vast. If your team lives in complex spreadsheets or leans on Google's app marketplace, that gravity is real and Proton will feel lighter. Pick Workspace when encryption and price matter more than document-suite depth. Stay on Google when the spreadsheet is the product.
The verdict: which Proton plan to buy
Restated per use case, because that is the decision you came for. All prices are monthly on annual billing, sourced above.
| Your situation | The pick | Price (Proton, valydex) | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Solo operator running a VPN, password manager, and storage separately | Proton Unlimited | $9.99/mo | Consolidates three invoices into one, adds email, 500 GB Drive, and Lumo at roughly your current spend |
| Team of 2 to 10 leaving Google Workspace | Proton Workspace Standard | $12.99/seat | Encrypted full suite on your domain at the category's low price, no minimum seat count, 14-day trial |
| Team worried about AI ingesting sensitive data | Proton Workspace Premium | $24.99/seat | The only tier that bundles Lumo AI plus Scribe, so private AI is built into the suite instead of bolted on |
One flip condition worth stating. If you only need a single service, skip the bundle entirely and buy that one product: Proton Mail for private email, Proton VPN for the VPN alone, or Proton Pass for the password manager. Unlimited is a consolidation play. It is a strong one when you are already paying for the parts, and an overspend when you are not.
For most solo operators reading this, the answer is Unlimited at $9.99/mo (per Proton, fetched July 7, 2026). Sign up on Proton's Unlimited plan, point Lumo at the data you cannot send elsewhere, and cancel the three subscriptions it just replaced.