From Black Friday until Cyber Monday, we are making ProtonMail Lifetime Accounts available again!

The ProtonMail Lifetime Account is the most exclusive ProtonMail account available, with only 150 accounts in existence worldwide. For the first time in over 2 years, we are making a small number of Lifetime accounts available between November 25th and 28th. A ProtonMail Lifetime Account is a special account that gives the account owner ProtonMail Visionary status for life.

As you may already know, ProtonMail Visionary is our highest paid tier (priced at 288€ per year) and comes with a number of special benefits including:

Access to all features

Highest limits for options such as storage space, additional addresses, custom domain support, etc

Early access to new features (business accounts will first launch to Visionary users)

Priority customer support

The name visionary comes from ProtonMail history, from the original crowdfunding campaign that made ProtonMail possible. During that time, a select number of individuals donated for the Visionary level, which contributed a significant amount of funds to kickstart the project. Even today, many of our Visionary level users are upgrading just to support ProtonMail.

The ProtonMail Lifetime Account also comes from ProtonMail history, and since it was last offered in 2014, it’s become a mythical account that most ProtonMail users have never heard of. The Lifetime Account is not subscription based – instead, the account is purchased once and then it entitles the account owner to have Visionary status forever. The Lifetime Account has a few other perks as well:

Lifetime Accounts will automatically get lifetime premium accounts for other services ProtonMail may introduce in the future (file storage, calendar, etc)

Lifetime status can be transferred to any ProtonMail account (if you change username, you can move Lifetime status to your new account)

There are no restrictions on sale/resale of Lifetime accounts (we know of at least one incident of a resale of a Lifetime account on the secondary market)

Thus, not only are Lifetime accounts a great way to support ProtonMail (proceeds from this Lifetime Account offering will be used to fund 2017 infrastructure upgrades), they could also end up delivering a lot of value.

ProtonMail Lifetime Accounts were last available in 2014, when a batch of 150 were sold as part of our crowdfunding campaign to raise funds to scale ProtonMail. Back then, they were priced at $997 and all 150 accounts sold out. Without this critical support and trust from these early backers, ProtonMail would not have come into being.

For Black Friday and Cyber Monday this year, ProtonMail Lifetime Accounts will be priced higher since the price offered for the crowdfunding campaign was a one time event. The 2016 Lifetime Accounts will be priced at 1337€, and only 50 will be available. In the unlikely event that we make Lifetime Accounts available again in the future, they will be certainly more expensive. (Nov 26 update: Since Lifetime Accounts sold out before all users were notified, we have added more Lifetime Accounts to this offering so the users who were notified late also have an equal opportunity to obtain one: https://protonmail.com/blog/lifetime-accounts-available-again/)

In order to purchase one of the 50 Lifetime Accounts available, you must first already have a ProtonMail account. If you don’t already have an account, you can get one for free here: https://protonmail.com/signup

After logging into your ProtonMail account through our website, you can purchase a Lifetime Account by clicking on the special Black Friday Sale button. This button will not be available after Cyber Monday (November 28). If the button does not appear for you, please refresh the page and it will appear.

This will take you for a special page where you can purchase one of the 50 available Lifetime Accounts until they are sold out. If you have any questions, you can contact our team at contact@protonmail.ch. The crucial funds raised through this limited time promotion will go towards the large scale infrastructure investments ProtonMail plans to make in 2017 to further improve reliability and resilience against attack. We’re grateful for our support and look forward to announcing some major features next month!

Best Regards,

The ProtonMail Team

ProtonMail Lifetime Accounts are also subject to ProtonMail’s standard Terms and Conditions. Unlike the 2014 Lifetime Accounts, the 2016 edition will not include a t-shirt or gift from CERN, as we no longer have inventory of those items.

