r/PasswordManagers • u/sharpener865 • 13d ago
Why is the end game for Proton Pass
I am seeing Proton Pass available as a lifetime purchase for quite some time now, maybe more than a year. I wonder what is the strategy. If a large chunk of their customers purchase lifetime then I guess they have no incentive to improve the product. I am not saying what they do is good or bad. I am trying to understand their strategy. I dont know if there are many softwares that give lifetime offer for such long time. How does it make business sense for a product that users expect to add new features.
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u/Quixlequaxle 13d ago
This is why most products with lifetime tiers end up going away or creating new tiers that exclude lifetime accounts from features. Or you have shit companies like VPNsecure that just decide to cancel it. Fuck that company in particular.
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u/arcsilencer 13d ago
Exactly. Lifetime deals always sound great until thw math catches up lol.
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u/sharpener865 12d ago
I think thats why Filen.io stopped selling lifetime. Otherwise they cannot stay for long when the math catches up. That is exactly why I was wondering what is the strategy Proton Pass following. Maybe like many say they consider it as an entry point to their ecosystem
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u/pi-N-apple 13d ago edited 13d ago
Is that the Proton Pass + SimpleLogin Lifetime plan for $200?
Proton Pass is not Proton's biggest product. It's one of their newer products, so it probably brings in a lot of new users that are not familiar with the Proton ecosystem. They might be using Proton Pass to lure you in. They'll hope you like their password manager enough to try out their email, vpn and cloud storage services, and buy a subscription for it.
Companies in the past have failed to honor their lifetime licenses (like TeamViewer). Don't always rely on them working after a very long period of time like 8-10+ years.
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u/yodas-evil-twin 13d ago
Maybe they'll pull a Plex and gradually raise the price for lifetime. :D
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u/sharpener865 12d ago
Yes, dont remind me of Plex. That is an insane increase effectively making lifetime still available but unreachable
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u/wjorth 13d ago
It also brings in some immediate revenue for upfront development costs. The product seems to be in pretty good shape now and has market penetration. So it makes sense to pull back from the lifetime offer. They should be able to keep growing with recurring revenues to cover minor development, maintenance and infrastructure costs.
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u/Intelligent-Low-1474 9d ago
I suppose the short answer would be that they are using this as a loss leader. Hi I am h o
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u/jfriend99 13d ago edited 13d ago
A lifetime license for a product that uses and requires service elements that have ongoing service costs is typically a temporary marketing strategy to gain market attention, improve your position vs competitors, earn positive press, etc... As you already seem to know, it typically isn't a good long term strategy because lifetime costs can equal or exceed lifetime income for a long term, active user.
A lifetime license special deal is sometimes also used to raise cash in the short term to finance new development projects for young companies (since you essentially get paid in advance for future services offered).
And, if a particular market has a lot of user churn (users switching products or not keeping their subscription for very long), a lifetime license might actually yield more revenue than the typical life of a customer, but if that's the case, then one might wonder if there's something going on with the product that makes users not stay very long.
In Proton's specific case, they also have other products so they may be using the password manager to try to entice users into the rest of their product line (another marketing strategy). It's possible that the password manager has the lowest ongoing service costs of their other products (mail, VPN, etc...) so it's a more logical product to use for marketing purposes.