It would be convenient if Proton Drive had a one-time only, lifetime subscription plan; like pCloud and IceDrive do. Not even Sync.com has that option.

Country-dependent pricing model would do the trick - just like any other worldwide subscription based services these days operate.

For a "Plus" plan equivalent in my country I can get a whole bunch of apple services (50GB iCloud storage space included) or Spotify Premium for the whole family.
I guess less revenue is better than no revenue.

This will never happen and is a false hope, protonVPN and the other services they build are quality products that require a steady stream of income to produce and maintain, lifetime plans are a hoax at best, most company's that offer these services wont last very long, or change company names regularly as they don't profit from the lifetime 'deal'. They rely on over-selling & over-hyping there product, providing people a false hope of a 'lifetime' product that usually has a very short life span, or is just generally a terrible product which is garbage in comparison to paid services.

For regular people, the price is hard to swallow. There is nothing between free and fairly expensive. It's very understandable that they need to charge to keep the operation going, but I wonder how many more people would pay if there was a more affordable plan. Regular, non-power users, just need enough storage and preferably the ability to send from the "pm.me" domain.

I also think there could be work done to make it easier to clean up your inbox. There's also a bunch of redundant data (logos and corporate pictures that are the same for tens of e-mails - this adds up).

That doesn't make any sense because they will stop making money if they make a lifetime plan, and you know it. The only reason why you want to buy the lifetime plan is because you are too broke to buy it every years

I see why this option would be voted down but I think I could over time come to swallow the pill of paying upwards of $5,000 for lifetime for using 80% of the functions of visionary (all the features I use)

Not a ote for cheaper plans but for a lifetime option (business wise this also may make sense for a @protonmail.com email account only as its free advertising and business accounts are high volume and cost also to keep everything operating smoothly for these business accounts)

P.S. I would not switch to a non Business account/ Visionary to use Lifetime

Actually it is not cheaper than Microsoft. I use Microsoft 365 for my organization, even though I prefer ProtonMail. Microsoft 365 is only $5 per user, and this includes a huge variety of features, from Office, OneDrive, Teams, Tasks, much more storage and these products all talk to each other, and are easy to use Active Directory with, for which the basic version of Azure AD is free.

It's much more mature of an integration of productivity products like calendars, meetings, reminders, for less than what the organization account costs here.

I think the organization account type should be much less money.

Please have a lifetime plan for VPN.

Please have a lifetime plan for VPN.

There should be a discount code for Students linked to their university / high school .. otherwise I think commercially it is fine as it is cheaper than Microsoft.

I avoid anything that requires an obligation to maintain such as a subscription, additionally I have a certain degree of resentment towards anything fostering a trend of non-ownership.
Which is why Lifetime memberships appeal to me, However I'm in my 50's and paying for 30yrs worth of membership (which I wont do if it requires me to remember to pay every X yrs and / or potentially lose some archived mail.) could be considerably cheaper then Lifetime, so either way I may not be impressed.
But maybe you 'could' offer something that appeals to people like me and even offer a senior discount.

Protonmail should add a new type of paid plan that might be interesting for those clients that don't want to subscribe for a monthly/annually/2-year plan. There might be those that want a Lifelong / Perpetual one time payment subscription plan. So Protonmail might set the price (e.g. 120 months paid once) and users would be able to buy their perpetual account.
P.S. Protonmail might (at least) offer that plan option once a year as a BLACK FRIDAY promo too!

It would be amazing to be able to have lifetime options for ProtonDrive. For example, pCloud has 2TB for lifetime.

Stop being poor!

I would pay $1000USD to $5000USD for a lifetime account.

I agree that for what it offers, the Premium Version is reasonably priced. And if you use these features and pay for Premium more power to you.
But I'm a student with a limited income and all i want is a private E-Mail provider, that doesnt sell my data or bombard me with Spam.
The only feature i would wish for, that isn't allready included in the Free Plan, is the ability to use Protonmail with Thunderbird.

Having to go to the Website, Login, remember where i left my Phone, open Authy, enter the Code before the Timer runs out... is just a lot of hassle jut to write a short Mail.
I love Protonmail as an idea, but right now I still use my Gmail-Account more than Protonmail.
And 4 Euro/Month, just to use Protonmail with Thunderbird is a steep hurdle for me right now. That's about 1% of my disposable Income at the moment.
I would love if there was a tier between the free version and the premium version, where you could pay 1-2€ for less features than Premium, but with acces to Proton mail Bridge.

Yes please! pCloud offers a lifetime plan.

Using the highest quality product we've received, the consistent/ ongoing improvements, and the plans PM has committed and delivered --> this is a bargain. From a business standpoint, especially for a company developing product(s) in lieu of building on others platforms (Firefox), a SaaS model is vital to ensure security of existence and continuous development.
As a side note, I do not believe in discounts for full & multi-year agreements and would pass the credit card fees to the customer - other services that most use offer lower fees. Easy to say, but I've run a SaaS-based tech company and consult for several; Microsoft and other mature companies are the extortionists. At this point, unless wealthy before this endeavor, it's likely owners (at least) have gone without being paid.

I wouldn't find 4 euros expensive if I lived in an European country, but I live in Peru (south america) and those euros are valued currently at 3.8 times my current currency. So that makes it a bit expensive to consider pay a subscription. And not counting all the taxes that I have to pay with my card in each payment.

It's not sustainable so it's never going to happen.