- Proton, known for its secure email and productivity services, is transitioning to a nonprofit foundation model, ensuring it remains mission-focused without reliance on external subsidies.
- The Proton Foundation, now the primary shareholder, is located in Switzerland, which mandates that foundations act according to their established purpose, bolstering Proton’s commitment to privacy.
- Proton has expanded its offerings to include cloud storage, password management, calendars, and VPN services, all designed with end-to-end encryption and hosted in Switzerland, enhancing its privacy-first approach.
We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto “foundations”)," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. “Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core.”
Nonprofits are allowed to make a profit. They just have to roll it back into the operation. (Can’t hand it out to shareholders, board members, etc.)
Well they can pay compensation to people who do work for them: employee salaries, contractor work, etc. So the nonprofit structure might prevent them from paying dividends or stock buybacks or other ways of transferring directly to shareholders in their capacity as shareholders, but nonprofit structure alone isn’t a guarantee that the organization won’t steer excess cash into someone’s pocket.
No reason to believe this is true of this non-profit, but that’s the reason why it’s important to look at the books of nonprofits that you donate to.
All good points. 👍