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[StudentBeans] Free 12-Month Proton Pass Plus Password Manager Subscription (US$1.99/Month Thereafter) + More @ Proton

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Proton is offering significant discounts on their privacy-focused services for students in the AU, US, UK, France, and Germany after announcing student discounts two days ago. Here's what's available:

  • Proton Pass Plus: FREE for up to 2 years
  • Proton Mail Plus: 80% off ($1/month) for 1 month
  • Proton Drive Plus: 50% off ($1.99/month) for 12 months
  • Proton VPN Plus: 50% off ($2.49/month) for 12 months
  • Proton Unlimited: 50% off ($4.99/month) for 12 months

How to Claim:

  • Visit https://proton.me/student
  • Select your preferred plan
  • Verify your student status with Student Beans (account required)
  • Apply the coupon provided by Student Beans at checkout

Key Points

  • Available to university, college, sixth form, high school students, and apprentices
  • Student status must be verified through Student Beans
  • Proton Pass Plus can be extended for a second free year by referring 2 friends
  • Discounts are one-time offers, except for Proton Pass Plus

Pricing Hack:

Save more money by selecting USD over EUR/CHF - see comment below for breakdown.

For those privacy focused, StudentBean will ask you to link your details to ProtonMail for the deal, this may not be for you if you're trying to remain anonymous and have gone to the effort of Gift Cards / Cypto.

Referral Links

Referral: random (58)

Referee gets 30 days free ProtonMail Plus.
Referrer gets 1-3 months free ProtonMail Plus once referee buys their own ProtonMail Plus plan (<12 months subs = 1 month, 12+ months = 3 months).

Related Stores

Proton Mail
Proton Mail
Student Beans
Student Beans

Comments

  • all in €eur/$usd still bloody expensive.

    • +3

      Yeah you can save a bit of money with the currencies by selected USD and use your Up Card / ING. Terrible pricing strategy on their end re: currencies not converting properly.

      • CHF 2.49 = $4.30 AUD
      • USD 2.49 = $3.69 AUD
      • EUR 2.49 = $4.04 AUD
      • Not familiar with the Up Card. How does this reduce the price?

        • +7

          Ubank, UP, ING are just examples of banks that don't charge international conversion fees (typically 3%) and instead rely on the direct Mastercard/visa exchange rate, saving you a bit of money.

        • +2

          We can use Wise or Revolut too.

          • @neoleo: Can I just say please stay away from Wise they are a terrible company to have dealings with if something goes wrong they left my father in Australia for 5 weeks without his UK pension and he was dealing with lung cancer just take a look at the reviews on any review site and you will see that they have frozen people's money and left them without any kind of help absolutely disgusting company

            • +1

              @Shaun Ross: Sorry for the terrible experience. What was the cause of frozen account in Wise? I have Wise account for years and never have problem with them so far.

      • +2

        I don't think it's necessarily a terrible pricing strategy, they care more about being 2.49 in the local currency of the majority of their users than min/maxing on forex. They offer an amazing free service and have recently switched to being not for profit.

        The majority of users who do pay would likely pay in their home currency and not sweat the exchange rates, as we need to convert from AUD to something it makes sense for us to pick the cheaper option. I doubt many in the EU would be paying in USD and dealing with the conversion.

  • Thanks Op For this! Have a great week

  • +8

    Absolutely had it with the Protonmail email searching, it's god awful even worse than outlook. Calendar is hard to work with and import too. Privacy over use-ability.

    • -2

      Yup. So over-hyped and over-priced. Literally spent the whole day migrating back to my old services after having enough of Proton.

    • +2

      Not fully mature software unfortunately. Still going to stick with it because it will improve. Proton Drive is a long way off dropbox functionality and usability but privacy wins for me.

    • +3

      Because proton mail encrypts the message except for email headers and the subject line. You can only search through your email and filter them using those areas.

    • +3

      You can search for the body contents of email at https://proton.me/support/search-message-content

      If you care about your privacy but don't want end-to-end encryption, Fastmail is an alternative. Everything should work as expected

      • If you care about your privacy but don't want end-to-end encryption, Fastmail is an alternative. Everything should work as expected

        +1

  • +3

    You can also test Proton Unlimited for only 1$/€ for the 1st month (renew at full price afterwards) : https://proton.me/degoogle

    I was only interested with their vpn. So perfect for me

    • How did the vpn perform?. I already use proton freebie email and use the freebie vpn (which from ive learned is slower right?) at times.

      • +1

        no complaints about speed.
        I tested several servers in multiple countries, and I don't see much differences in speed.
        Not that much drop.

        But if you're interested in streaming / geo-pricing stuff, then it's no good.
        Their servers are always detected.
        And a lot of geolocation issues.
        Like, I tested several of their servers in Turkey. And youtube was detecting me in DE, US, BR…. Rarely in Turkey.
        So mainly useful if you're interested in privacy and/or torrenting stuff.

        • Cheers. Thanks for the info. Only use for geolocation for me was Netflix (when i had it. dont anymore) or Crunchyroll (which i do use but again im not paid customer anymore for now).For such a concentration on privacy im surprised they havent tried to make more of effort to make sure geolocation works better

          • @smurfinaus: I use the VPN with an unlimited account and have zero issues with netflix US, Canada etc. Same with youtube. Reddit flags servers so I do have to find one that works.

  • +3

    Be careful using their calendar, it's buggy and loses appointments. When I changed appointment times they just disappeared. Happened to me twice so I stopped using it.

  • -1

    IDK, why not just use TOR for your VPN , and outlook for email?

    Am i naive to think either of those free services are enough?.

    • +6

      Proton is about privacy. Outlook.com is fine is that’s not a priority for you.

        • +9

          ok peter dutton

        • +25

          Australia Post doesn't read your mail, they just deliver it. It is a crime for anyone else to open your mail too, obvious exception for law enforcement with the right authorisations.

          We have now moved away from mail delivery as it's cheaper for businesses to do everything electronically, yet we have no such digital protections. Google reads your email and presents ads against the content, Microsoft do similar things.

          Proton mail sells a service where they offer similar levels of privacy to regular mail, people who think that is worthwhile pay for the service. People who prefer their data be analysed and sold to pay for their email service stay with the major IT companies. Thankfully the market has provided us with choice.

          Finally, privacy and the expectation of privacy has nothing to do with hiding wrong doing, as law abiding citizens we should have the expectation of privacy until we do something wrong. Unfortunately that line is blurring towards mass surveillance with the lie of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". The truth is actually "I've done nothing wrong, I shouldn't be surveilled".

          • @OzzyBrak:

            Australia Post doesn't read your mail, they just deliver it. It is a crime for anyone else to open your mail too, obvious exception for law enforcement with the right authorisations.

            We have now moved away from mail delivery as it's cheaper for businesses to do everything electronically, yet we have no such digital protections.

            so AusPost or government should offer email (hosting) service?

            privacy and the expectation of privacy has nothing to do with hiding wrong doing, as law abiding citizens we should have the expectation of privacy until we do something wrong. Unfortunately that line is blurring towards mass surveillance with the lie of "nothing to hide, nothing to fear". The truth is actually "I've done nothing wrong, I shouldn't be surveilled".

            +1

        • +10

          I have nothing to hide when I get dressed but I still shut the blinds bro.

          The new Outlook and Windows 11 are data harvesting machines. Microsoft shares your data with 801 third parties!

          https://proton.me/blog/outlook-is-microsofts-new-data-collec…

    • +7

      go spend a week using tor for your vpn and see how many sites work and how fast it is

    • +2

      Not all, but many free mail services scan/read your emails to monetise from your content, data is usually anonymised to get around privacy concerns. You have to read the fine prints to understand exactly what they do with your data.

      Also, you will need a paid service if you want custom domain emails, especially if you want to send email from your custom domain, most SMTP servers aren't free.

      • +1

        Zoho is free for email on a custom domain, both sending and receiving. 5 users, 5GB of storage each.

        • For some reason they have stopped advertising the "Forever Free Plan", they have removed it from the pricing page: https://www.zoho.com/mail/zohomail-pricing.html

          There were 3 tiles before: Forever Free Plan, Contact Sales, Flexible Pricing. Like this: https://files.ozbargain.com.au/upload/14216/116499/zoho.png

          Anyway, if you signup and not subscribe to a paid plan, then you are automatically on the free plan. But it's no longer clear what's included in the free paid and if they will start taking features away from the free plan.

          Zoho Mail is cheap because their main game is business collaboration, they have an ecosystem of apps, email hosting is just one of those capabilities. Probably can't beat Proton on security and privacy, but should be fine for most personal and small business use.

    • Nothing is "free". Your personal information or content of emails are used to pay for the services' costs.

      If you're okay with this, there's nothing wrong using Outlook or Gmail.

  • +1

    The Proton website blog article's title says: "US, UK, France, and Germany"

    This offer applies to anyone studying at university, college, sixth form, high school, or as an apprentice in the US, UK, France, and Germany.

    I navigated to the www.studentbeans.com/au website and typed in 'proton' in the Search bar … the search results only yields "Oroton", NOT Proton

    … whereas typing in 'proton' in the Search bar for:

    With these observations … are AU students definitely confirmed to be included in regards to these Proton subscription offers ?

    • +3

      The free Proton Pass Plus works for me using my Australian Student Beans account.

      • Thanks for your confirmation - I had re-read the Proton website's blog article, and its wording doesn't mention Australian students whatsoever, only students in US/UK/France/Germany … which led me to think that this Proton deal wasn't applicable for Australian students

        … when you successfully claimed the Proton Pass Plus (12 months), were there any specific steps that you did differently, with what was outlined in the 4-steps described on the OP deal description's "How to Claim" ?

        • +1

          No, I just clicked on the link and logged into my Student Beans account. Everything else was just clicks and no entering of codes.

    • +2

      Can confirm, I just signed up to Proton Unlimited for a year via student beans with an Australian Education email.

    • +1

      Apparently they are looking to expand the program beyond those 4 countries.

      https://www.reddit.com/r/ProtonMail/comments/1g0n9e2/comment… (2 days ago)

      Not sure if they are so efficient or there's a loophole they did not know. :D

  • i know its secure because it's the platform choice of the independent prostitutes

    • +1

      Would that mean banking and government services are full of prostitutes?

    • +3

      You must go through a lot, to know the prostitutes email of choice! :)

      • knowledge is power boy

  • Whats the difference between proton and gmail?

  • Slightly off topic: how do you counter organisations that expects you to be logged in to MS and Google to use their services? My tafe uses Team and Gmail and have built their Moodle auth around MS (presumably LDAP). I have installed chromium just for this, and it’s awful because chromium then automatically identifies the user profile with the Gmail account 😣 And at times I needed to log into the system on my phone: it only took one hit to link all the data…

    • +1

      Not much you can do outside of practicing good device compartmentalisation.

  • +3

    As a satisfied paying customer for both Proton (Unlimited) and Bitwarden, I'd go with the latter if you're only after a password manager. I think the free version of Bitwarden now allows for TOTP codes, so I'm not sure what the difference would be (I don't make use of the Proton Pass).

    • +1

      I also use Bitwarden Premium and Proton Pass Plus. Both are good.

      The main advantage of Proton Pass is the Simple Login integration. It's so quick and easy to create aliases on the fly for logins etc and easily disable or terminate them later if need be. Easily see where spam is coming from. You don't give out your real email address to companies and websites. Killer feature and AFAIK there is no other password manager with this feature.

      The main advantages of Bitwarden for me are the ability to store files in your encrypted vault e.g copy of your passport, and the compatibility with FIDO2 and hardware tokens e.g Yubikeys. There's never been an account takeover in the world on an account using hardware tokens for 2FA. They also do a handshake with the websites you log in to so if you click on a phishing link or go to a fake website the hardware token will refuse to authenticate and will protect you from the malicious site.

      All of those features are only available on the paid plans.

      If you want a free password manager with all essential features I'd go for Bitwarden. If you want your password manager to be un-hackable Bitwarden Premium with hardware tokens for 2FA is the go. If you want email aliases seamlessly integrated with your password manager Proton Pass Plus is the go.

      For me the Simple Login integration wins it for Proton Pass. I use Yubico Authenticator to get around the lack of support for hardware tokens. It's still young, hopefully they'll introduce native hardware token compatibility and file storage sometime.

      • +1

        if you know what you are doing , you can get all the premium stuff for free
        https://github.com/dani-garcia/vaultwarden

        • Nice, thanks. I think $10USD/year is pretty good value, but free is always better :)

          Wish there was a way to get the Proton premium features for free!

      • Yeah, I use SimpleLogin too. I find it easy enough to create an alias very quickly (using the browser extension) and just copy/pasting that into my new Bitwarden entry. I also secure my Bitwarden with Yubikeys.

        • Sounds like we're operating the same way.

          How do you save your 2FA backups/recovery keys? I save them in password protected encrypted documents then add them as secure notes in Bitwarden with "master password re-prompt" enabled. Not sure I'm totally happy with them stored in the password manager where all the accounts and passwords also are though. Haven't found a better option yet.

          • @sav11: My Bitwarden vault has both TOTP and FIDO2 WebAuthn setup as 2FA. For TOTP, I use Ente Auth (of which the credentials are stored in Bitwarden) and the FIDO2 is obviously the Yubikeys - one kept on premises and the other off-site.

            I have the recovery key for Bitwarden printed out and kept on premises but in reality, I have the biometric Face ID unlock on my iPhone/fingerprint on iPad and because my Bitwarden master password is stored within Bitwarden itself, I could remind myself that way if I ever forgot the password.

            The reason for both TOTP and FIDO2 is some devices (ex: iPad) don't support Yubikeys. The TOTP credentials are accessible via Bitwarden so I don't think Ente Auth is an attack vector on its own (as to get into this, you would've gotten it from the Bitwarden vault). Same with storing my Bitwarden master password within the app itself - it is already compromised if the vault has been unlocked by a bad actor.

            I probably differ a bit here, so would invite any thoughts or consideration from you.

      • You can use SimpleLogin with Bitwarden though? When you generate a username you have the option of using a forwarded email alias, SimpleLogin is one of the options. Just provide API key and server URL.

        • I did that when Proton Pass didn't exist yet.

          You can only generate 10 SimpleLogin aliases with a free account. Then you need the paid version or Proton Pass Plus which includes that.

          It's also just easier and more seamless the way they have integrated it.

          • @sav11: Only thing is then you're getting yourself locked into into the Proton ecosystem. If you ever want to change password managers then it's a huge task. Best is by far (my opinion) is a having your own custom domain for unlimited aliassing and pairing it up with Anonaddy, Fastmail, etc.

      • Bitwarden integrates with SimpleLogin as well as a variety of other email aliasing services.

        • I used to do that.

          You can only generate 10 SimpleLogin aliases with a free account. I don't know of any others that provide unlimited free persistent aliases (but if you know of any please let me know!).

          The Proton Pass/SimpleLogin integration is a superior UX than Bitwarden for that feature.

          • @sav11: Anonaddy, DuckDuckGo, Firefox Relay (to name a few) all offer unlimited persistent email aliases with a free account.

            • @Vernon Koekemoer: Anonaddy has limitations on free accounts like only 10Mb bandwidth, DuckDuckGo you can only register one persistent alias per browser, Firefox Relay free accounts can only have 5 aliases.

              They all require you to be on a paid tier to be able to functionally use aliases on every login (so does Proton Pass, all I'm pointing out is their integration provides a great UX that others don't have).

  • +3

    It's good that they're targeting students, the more privacy focused young people the better moving forward, hopefully can influence some to de-google their life.

    Been with Proton for Mail and Drive now for about a year and I haven't looked back.

    • +3

      Absolutely agree! love r/Privacy as well, great for info.

  • Bitwarden peeps. Open source/battle tested. Free. Paid version optional, with minor added benefits.

  • Thanks OP, would have taken the offer…but not a student.

  • I like using proton great company friendly but the biggest problem is after a year you have to pay for it all and if you have all your different things with them you would lose it all

  • How do I claim the mail promo if i'm an existing user?

  • Bitwarden is always free

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