Proton Mail’s free plan is one of the few free inboxes that isn’t paid for with your data. It is also tightly capped. Here is exactly what you get, the limits you will hit first, and when it is worth paying.
Paul O'BrienProton Mail’s free plan is one of the very few free inboxes that isn’t paid for with your data. It is also deliberately small. That makes it an excellent way to try Proton, and a poor place to keep the email address your whole life depends on.
I have written plenty about Proton already: a full Proton Mail review, a comparison with Gmail, and an honest look at what Proton does and doesn’t hide. What I haven’t done is answer the question I get asked most often: is the free plan enough?
The honest answer is that it depends less on how private you want to be and more on how you use email. The free plan’s privacy is the same as the paid plans’. What changes is capacity, convenience and how tightly your address is tied to Proton. This guide walks through what you actually get, the limits that bite first and why, how I would set up a free account so it doesn’t let you down, and how to tell when it is time to pay.
Short answer: the free plan gives you the same encryption as the paid plans, one address, up to 1 GB of mail storage and a sending limit of 150 messages a day. It has no custom domain, no support for Outlook or Apple Mail and only three folders. It is ideal for testing Proton or for a low-traffic private address. If Proton is going to be your main inbox, Mail Plus is where it becomes practical.
Plan details and prices checked on Proton’s pricing and support pages on 23 October 2026. Proton changes its plans from time to time, so check before you rely on a specific figure.
Try Proton Mail free. Start on the free plan and upgrade only if it suits you. Proton’s paid plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee.
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Free email is never really free. Somebody pays for the servers, the spam filtering and the staff, and with most free providers that somebody is an advertiser. Your attention, and often what can be learned from your inbox, is the product. I went into that in more detail in free vs paid email: what you really pay with.
Proton works the other way round. It says it is funded entirely by paying subscribers, and its own plans page describes the free tier as being there for people who need privacy but can’t pay. There are no adverts, and because stored mail is protected by zero-access encryption, Proton couldn’t mine your inbox for targeting even if it wanted to.
That doesn’t make the free plan a charity. It is also Proton’s shop window. The limits are set so that light users can stay free for years, while anyone who starts to rely on the account feels a gentle push towards paying. I don’t think that is cynical. It is a fair trade, and it is far more honest than a free inbox that quietly pays for itself with your data. But it helps to know that the limits are deliberate, because it tells you which ones will pinch.
The good news first. Proton doesn’t hand free users a weaker version of its privacy. Mail stored in your account is protected by the same zero-access encryption as on the paid plans, mail between Proton users is end-to-end encrypted, and you can send password-protected emails to people on other providers.
| Feature | Proton Free | What it means in practice |
|---|---|---|
| Mail storage | 500 MB, rising to 1 GB | You unlock the full 1 GB by completing Proton’s getting-started steps for Mail. |
| Addresses | 1 Proton address | An @proton.me address. No extra addresses, no short @pm.me address and no custom domain. |
| Sending | 150 messages a day | Each recipient counts, so one email to ten people uses ten of the 150. |
| Folders and labels | 3 folders, 3 labels | The limit most people notice first if they like to file things. |
| Filters | 1 custom filter | Enough to route one newsletter, not to organise an inbox. |
| Attachments | Up to 25 MB | The same as the paid plans. |
| Encryption | Zero-access storage, end-to-end between Proton users, password-protected emails, encrypted contacts | The core privacy model is identical to the paid plans. |
| Moving in | Easy Switch import assistant | Proton’s tool for bringing mail, contacts and calendars across from Gmail and others. |
| Desktop email apps | Not included | Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird need IMAP/SMTP through Proton Mail Bridge, which is paid only. Proton’s own desktop app is a 14-day trial on the free plan. |
| Automatic forwarding | Not included | You can’t automatically pass your Proton mail on to another account. |
One point is worth being clear about, because it is the most common misunderstanding I see. The encryption on the free plan is the same, but encryption has limits on every plan. When you email someone on Gmail or Outlook, the copy that lands in their inbox is readable by their provider unless you use a password-protected email. Proton also says subject lines and sender and recipient addresses are encrypted but not end-to-end encrypted. None of that is a free plan problem. It is how email works, and I cover it properly in zero-access encryption: what it really means.
The free account isn’t only email. The same login gives you free versions of Proton’s other apps, and for many people this is the real attraction: a private alternative to a whole set of Google services, not just Gmail.
| App | Free allowance |
|---|---|
| Proton Calendar | 3 personal calendars, end-to-end encrypted, and you can send and receive invitations. Sharing a calendar with someone else needs a paid plan. |
| Proton Drive | 2 GB, rising to 5 GB once you complete the Drive getting-started steps. Separate from your mail storage, with online documents and spreadsheets. |
| Proton Pass | Password manager with unlimited logins, 2 vaults and 10 hide-my-email aliases |
| Proton VPN | 1 device, servers in 10 countries chosen for you, at medium speed |
| Other apps | Free tiers of Proton Wallet, the Lumo AI assistant and Proton Meet video calls (one-hour meetings, up to 50 people) |
The ten hide-my-email aliases are the most underrated part of the free account. Each one is a random address that forwards to your inbox. Give a different one to every shop, newsletter and forum, and if one starts attracting spam or turns up in a breach, you switch it off without touching your real address. Ten isn’t many, so I would save them for the sign-ups most likely to leak or sell your address. I explain the idea in more depth in why masked email beats disposable email.
In my experience, people rarely leave the free plan because of storage alone. They leave because one of the following starts to get in the way every day.
If you file mail into folders, three runs out on day one. Labels have the same cap, and you only get one filter to sort mail automatically. You can live with this by archiving everything and relying on search, which is how many people use Gmail anyway. The catch is that Proton can’t read your mail on its servers, so search works differently. Searching message bodies means building an encrypted index on your own device, and on a large mailbox that is noticeably slower and less seamless than Gmail. So “just search for it” works, but it isn’t quite the answer it is elsewhere.
150 messages a day sounds generous for personal email, and for most people it is. But Proton counts recipients, not emails. A message to ten people uses ten of your daily allowance, so a few replies-to-all on a family thread or a note to a club mailing list eat into it quickly. Paid plans remove the daily cap for legitimate mail, though Proton is clear that no plan can be used for mass mailing.
On the free plan your address ends in @proton.me. That is fine for a private or secondary address, but it ties you to Proton. If you ever leave, the address stays behind, and every account you registered with it has to be changed one by one. For anyone choosing a long-term main address, I think the single best decision is to put it on your own domain, so you can move provider without changing it. On Proton that needs Mail Plus or above.
Ordinary email apps talk to mail servers using IMAP and SMTP, and those standards assume the server can read your mail. Proton can’t, so its answer is Bridge, a small app that runs on your computer, decrypts mail locally and hands it to your email app. Bridge is paid only, and so is Proton’s own desktop app beyond a 14-day trial. On the free plan you use the web app in a browser and Proton’s mobile apps. That is perfectly usable, but if you live in a desktop email app, it means changing how you work.
Individually none of these is a deal-breaker, but together they are what makes the free plan feel basic once you use it every day. Free accounts don’t get auto-reply for holidays, scheduled sending or snooze, contact groups, catch-all addresses, automatic forwarding, calendar sharing, Emergency Access for a trusted contact, or Dark Web Monitoring. Support is also a step down: Proton lists priority support on Mail Plus and dedicated support on Unlimited, and neither on the free plan.
This is the one that catches people out, and the one I would take most seriously. Proton’s policy says a free account that hasn’t been used for 12 months can be deleted, along with everything in it: email, contacts, calendars, passwords in Pass and files in Drive. Proton sends reminders 30, 15 and 7 days before deletion, but those reminders go to the inbox you haven’t been checking.
Keeping the account alive is easy. Signing in to any Proton app and doing something simple, such as opening an email, viewing a file or connecting to the VPN, counts. Paid accounts are never deleted for inactivity.
Worth knowing: accounts created before April 2024 used to get a 24-month grace period, but Proton ended that on 9 April 2026, so every free account now follows the 12-month rule. Once an address is deleted it generally can’t be recovered or reused, which Proton says is to stop impersonation. If the address was the login or recovery email for other accounts, losing it can lock you out of those too.
If you decide the free plan is right for you, a little setup on day one avoids most of the problems above.
Put simply, the free plan suits people whose Proton address is light-touch: something you check now and then, or a way to try Proton before committing. It suits people least when the address becomes the centre of their online life.
| User profile | Best fit? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Trying Proton before paying | Ideal | Same encryption and apps as the paid plans, so you get an honest feel for the workflow. |
| A private address for sensitive conversations | Strong fit | Low volume, end-to-end encryption with other Proton users, and no adverts. Sign in regularly. |
| Moving away from Gmail on a budget | Partial fit | Works if your mail is light, but folders, storage and the lack of desktop email apps will pinch. |
| Your main personal inbox for years | Alternative needed | Tied to @proton.me, tight on storage and at risk if you ever stop signing in. Use Mail Plus with your own domain. |
| A small business or club | Alternative needed | No custom domain, three folders and a sending limit that counts every recipient. Look at Proton’s business plans or a provider such as Fastmail. |
If Proton suits you, Mail Plus is the plan that removes the limits that matter for email: your own domain, unlimited folders, labels and filters, Bridge for desktop email apps, no daily sending cap and the small conveniences listed above. Note that its 15 GB is shared between Mail and Drive.
Unlimited is a different decision. It adds 485 GB more storage, two more custom domains and the paid versions of Pass, Drive and VPN. If you already pay for a password manager or a VPN, it can work out good value. If you only want better email, Mail Plus is the better buy.
| Plan | Price | Storage | Addresses / Domains | Extras |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Proton Free | £0 | Up to 1 GB mail, up to 5 GB Drive | 1 address, no custom domain | 150 messages a day, 3 folders, 3 labels, 1 filter. No Bridge or automatic forwarding. |
| Mail Plus | £3.99/month, or £3.19/month on 12-month billing (£38.28 a year) | 15 GB shared with Drive | 10 addresses, 1 custom domain | Unlimited folders, labels, filters and messages, Bridge, auto-reply, scheduling, catch-all and priority support. |
| Proton Unlimited | £10.39/month, or £7.99/month on 12-month billing (£95.88 a year) | 500 GB | 15 addresses, 3 custom domains | Everything in Mail Plus, plus the paid versions of Pass, Drive and VPN, unlimited aliases, Proton Sentinel and dedicated support. |
Prices in pounds sterling as listed on Proton’s pricing page on 23 October 2026. Proton often runs discounts on annual billing, so check the current figure.
My rule of thumb is to upgrade when any one of these is true:
If none of those apply, stay on the free plan. There is nothing wrong with that, as long as you sign in at least once a year.
The obvious comparison is Gmail, which gives you far more space and works with any app. You pay for that differently, because Gmail sits inside an ad-funded business and Google can process what is stored in your account. Tuta is the closest like-for-like rival: also funded by paying customers, also zero-access, and also strict about using its own apps.
| Feature | Proton Free | Gmail | Tuta Free |
|---|---|---|---|
| Funded by | Paying customers | Google’s wider business, including advertising | Paying customers |
| Provider can read stored mail | No (zero-access) | Yes | No (zero-access) |
| Storage | Up to 1 GB mail | 15 GB shared across Google | 1 GB |
| Desktop email apps | Paid only (Bridge) | Yes, via IMAP | No, Tuta’s own apps only |
| Extras on the same account | Calendar, Drive, Pass, VPN | Calendar, Drive, Docs and the rest of Google | Calendar |
| Full review | Proton Mail review | Gmail vs Proton Mail | Tuta review |
Between the two privacy-first options, I would pick Proton’s free plan for most people, mainly because of the wider set of apps on one account and the hide-my-email aliases. Tuta is worth a look if you want more of your mailbox, including subject lines, encrypted.
Yes. There is no time limit and no card needed. The free plan is paid for by Proton’s paying customers, not by adverts or by reading your mail.
Mail starts at 500 MB and rises to 1 GB once you complete Proton’s getting-started steps. Proton Drive has its own allowance on top, starting at 2 GB and rising to 5 GB.
150, and each recipient counts. An email to ten people uses ten of your 150. Paid plans have no daily limit for legitimate mail.
No. Custom domains start with Mail Plus, which includes one. Proton Unlimited includes three.
It can, if you don’t sign in and use any Proton app for 12 months. Proton emails reminders 30, 15 and 7 days before deletion, and a deleted address generally can’t be recovered. Paid accounts are never deleted for inactivity.
No. Desktop email apps connect through Proton Mail Bridge, which needs a paid plan. On the free plan you use the web app or Proton’s mobile apps, and Proton’s own desktop app is a 14-day trial.
No. The encryption is the same. The paid plans add capacity and features rather than stronger privacy, apart from Proton Sentinel on Unlimited and above, which adds extra protection against account takeover.
Proton’s free plan is one of the most honest free products in email. You get Proton’s full privacy model, a calendar, file storage, a password manager with aliases and a VPN, with no adverts. In return you accept tight limits that are designed to nudge you towards paying once you rely on it.
Use it to find out whether Proton’s way of working suits you, or as a quiet private address you sign in to now and then. If it is going to become your main inbox, move to Mail Plus and put it on your own domain, so the address stays yours whatever happens.
If you want to see for yourself, start with Proton Mail free and give it a month before you decide.
Try Proton Mail free. No card needed for the free plan, and paid plans carry a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Referral link: I may earn a commission, at no extra cost to you.
Disclosure: This article contains affiliate links for Proton. If you sign up for a paid plan through them, I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you. The partnership doesn’t change what I say about the free plan’s limits.
Sources, checked 23 October 2026: Proton Mail pricing, Proton plans explained, Proton: inactive accounts, Proton: email forwarding.
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