It’s 2024, so it means that basically every tech company on the planet is raising their prices for their services. As companies run into the fact that there is a limited number of consumers out there who are going to pay for subscription services, a shocking number of them have turned to raising subscription fees in order to continue showing growth without necessarily needing to sign up new users.
Of course, this type of decision seems myopic. For one, it’s not sustainable; you can do that and maybe post growth for a year or two, but eventually you’re not going to be able to keep convincing people that they need your service at a higher and higher price point. And I used the word “maybe” in the last sentence because while some users will agree to pay a higher cost, there will be a percentage right out of the gate who decide that they’d rather just forgo the service entirely rather than shell out more money each month.
That’s why it’s even more of a welcome surprise now when a company decides to lower prices instead. This recently happened with Proton and their Proton Pass product. From their blog:
If we increase prices when costs go up, it’s only fair that we also reduce prices when costs go down — and this does happen from time to time due to economies of scale. For example, a few years ago, we tripled the storage that comes with our Proton Mail Plus plan without increasing prices.
Thanks to the swift adoption of Proton Pass and the rapid growth of the paid Proton Pass user base, we have achieved economies of scale sooner than anticipated. For this reason, we’re decreasing the price of Proton Pass Plus from $3.99/month to $1.99/month on the annual subscription for both new and existing customers.
We’re changing the price of Proton Pass Plus
To be clear, this change didn’t actually impact me; as a Proton Unlimited subscriber, Proton Pass is included as part of the bundle and isn’t billed separately. My Proton Unlimited price didn’t go down as the cost of Proton Pass as a part of that is already far less than the $2 USD per month stated in the blog post. However, it’s still awesome to see Proton doing this, and continues to give me faith that along with getting awesome services from them, I’m supporting a company working hard to do right by their customers.
In a similar vein, I was pleasantly surprised a few weeks ago when I received an email notification from my ISP, Altafiber, letting me know that they had increased my upload speed from 400 Mbps to 600 Mbps at no extra cost.
When I subscribed to Altafiber, I selected the plan I wanted (which was based on the upload and download speed pairings they offered) and the price, which at the time was locked in for 3 years. I’m only 1 year into that plan, so they had absolutely no need to increase my upload speed but opted to do so regardless. And as someone who occasionally has to upload virtual machine OVAs and tarballed Docker images for work, it’s something that I’ll be able to take advantage of!