One year ago, we launched ProtonMail Beta to bring easy to use private email to the world. We never imagined that our project would gather so much support from all around the world. Thanks to you, ProtonMail has grown incredibly in the past year. To celebrate our first anniversary and to thank all of our early supporters, we are making a big change to our free encrypted email service.

We’re excited to announce that we are upgrading all existing ProtonMail accounts to 1GB of storage within the next couple days, up from the current limit of 500MB.

Furthermore, any ProtonMail accounts requested by June 17, 2015 will have 1GB of storage when activated. If you have not signed up for a free email account, you can get one here.

We recently expanded our data center so we expect to be able to offer 1GB of free space until June 17, 2015, which is the 1-year anniversary of our record breaking crowdfunding campaign. Accounts created after June 17th will only come with 500MB of storage. Since free accounts now have 1GB of storage, this means that we will be offering our crowdfunding contributors between 2-5GB of storage in a future update!

When we launched our beta in May 2014, our free encrypted email accounts provided only 100MB of storage. With this latest upgrade to 1GB, we’ve been able to increase email storage space by 1000% in the past year, along with adding many new features.

We’ve made a lot of progress in the past year thanks to our amazing early adopters – without your support, none of this would have been possible. When we started, over 10,000 contributors raised over $500,000 in our record-breaking Indiegogo campaign to support free, private email. This was despite PayPal blocking our fundraising efforts. It was with this critical early support that we were able to develop new features and make ProtonMail even more secure and reliable for our users.

We were able to raise a further $2 million from supporters such as the Foundation Genevoise pour l’Innovation Technologique, a non-profit financed in part by the Swiss Federal Commission for Technology and Innovation. Thanks to this support, we’ve been able to grow our team from 3 to over 10 and have the resources to continue developing quickly.

Our small community has grown a lot in the past year and we are now providing email to nearly 500,000 users worldwide! Those of you who have been on the journey with us know that the ProtonMail of today looks nothing like the initial releases. You can now customize your inbox theme, create custom labels/folders to organize encrypted emails, use .ch or .com as your ProtonMail alias, encrypt attachments, and much much more.

We are happy to announce that we are close to the final stages of testing for the alpha version of the ProtonMail iOS and Android apps. If you were one of our Indiegogo ProtonMail Mobile supporters, you will soon receive an invitation to try out the beta mobile app before we do a wider public release.

For those who missed our crowdfunding campaign, it is still possible to support the project through our donations page. Thank you again for supporting us as we develop ProtonMail. With your help, we are turning into reality our vision of more secure email that respects privacy. We will continue to provide updates on our progress on our blog and on Twitter. If you have suggestions, please let us know on our feedback forum or just email us at contact@protonmail.ch to let us know your ProtonMail story.

Thank you,

The ProtonMail Team