I’m a regular Proton user, but with the recent regulatory changes in Switzerland, the more I dig into this, the more I have to ask myself: Seriously? How is this even possible?
In 2025, Proton launched Lumo, a so-called privacy-focused AI. Its servers are being moved to Germany and Norway instead of Switzerland, supposedly to avoid legal surveillance risks. They claim to have allocated around 100 million CHF just for Lumo’s infrastructure, R&D, and launch.
But here’s the kicker: Proton plans to invest over 1 billion CHF across all its products and expansions by 2030. That includes upgrades to Proton Mail, VPN, Drive, Pass, and general infrastructure, plus R&D.
And yet, Proton only has around 500 employees, including 159 engineers. For a company of this size, financing hundreds of millions, or over a billion CHF, purely from internal cash flow is, frankly, WTF ?!
So who is actually footing the bill for these grandiose plans? Subscription revenue? External investors? Or some opaque mix of both?
The real question is: if Proton increasingly depends on outside funding or strategic partnerships to chase these massive ambitions, can it really claim to be independent and safeguard user privacy, or is that just empty marketing spin?
Source : https://proton.me/blog/lumo-ai
It's not all that hard to imagine they make their money from subscriptions. They reached 100M accounts in 2023. Sure not all of those are paid accounts, but Proton isn't like MS or Google that offer free accounts without limits. Those limits are reached pretty quickly. They also do public fundraisers (usually around 1M) and get occassional grants from the EU. Combine that with just not so much wasteful spending as Silicon Valley and it's not that hard to imagine how they get their money. 1 billion spread out over 5 years doesn't seem that crazy to me, which is needed if the Swiss government does decide to fuck up their unique position by pass those surveillance laws. Proton's involvement in EuroStack should help too.
Is that the real question though? It's based on completely unverified assumptions and speculations. Don't get me wrong. 1B is a LOT and it's totally fair to question their business model and how they make that money, but let's not get into FUD territory.