Conflict of interest note: Windscribe is commercial open source VPN service provider based in Canada.
Why is ProtonVPN lying about running price sensitivity testing on their customers?
Their pricing page gives you one of two prices at random. This is A/B testing, but instead they’re saying the price difference is due to remnants of a sale.
Their own code says otherwise.
Price sensitivity testing is when a company quotes different people different prices for the same product to see if sales hold steady at the higher price. Not to be confused with adaptive or dynamic pricing which uses your personal data to adjust prices to you.
People on ProtonVPN’s subreddit noticed they were being quoted different prices for the same thing. ProtonVPN’s General Manager replied that the differences were due to remnants of a recent sale that wasn’t “universally refreshed”.
This was a lie, and we have proof.
That proof is their own code sorting every visitor into a price variant. It’s labeled right in the HTML tag:
ab-test:VpnHpAndPricingVpnPlusSensibility300726
Which in plain English is:
VPN Homepage and Pricing for the VPN Plus plan, Sensibility test tagged 30/07/26.
The price continues to flip-flop as of writing this. Expired sales don’t do this.
Something like a Cloudflare-cached page doesn’t add price sensitivity A/B tests to your HTML code.
Proton, if you want to run A/B tests, at least don’t lie about it to your users.
I asked on a previous post about this: how is this a conflict of interest? Did you mean it’s shady marketing? By saying something about the competition that seemingly is true?
It definitely seems to go against the spirit of how the company is being promoted.
They sell themselves as being user-oriented. There’s a million things these companies could do to make money off of your data, and this one claims to sacrifice all of that for the good of the user.
Now it turns out they are using shady anti-user marketing practices, which is almost to be expected for a for-profit company in this day and age. It does not align with a model that claims to have the user’s best interest at heart though, which is how they promote themselves.
I haven’t found their activism pitch to be credible for a while. One of the more eye-opening incidents was when ProtonMail gave up IP logs of a user and then removed “no logging” claims from their website. And then the next incident. And the next.
Anyone who trusted them was a dumbfuck.
I feel so fucking vindicated never trusting them every single time I learn something about them.
Which company are you talking about?
Proton
Be aware I dissociate from FHF
I have completely claimed to dissociate from all these parties, as my interests lie in darknet proxies.
If the claim is false. Is it?
Or is it because they posted about it rather than a link from a third party about it? The facts are the facts, if they’re valid, no matter where they come from. Even from a competitor.
I think you’re looking too far into this. Does Windscribe have a conflict of interest here? Objectively, yes: Information which is bad for Proton VPN is good for them.
Does that imply their information is incorrect or misleading? No, and I really don’t think OP meant to imply that. OP is just being responsible - it is always more honest to disclose a conflict of interest than to not, even when the information given is objectively verifiable, as it is here (I did do the same incognito test as in OP’s video and it did in fact do exactly the same price swapping for me).
All OP is doing in noting the CoI is being responsible. Knowing a conflict of interest exists doesn’t imply the information is unreliable or even misleading, but it does mean you should be a bit more objective or skeptical than you otherwise might be - that you should go the extra mile to check the information, like checking the code the post talks about or running the incognito test from the video. Or, especially, about any subjective opinions mixed into the facts - like speculations about motives or intentionality, or how “bad” certain facts may be.
And I think that’s especially relevant when talking about companies like Proton or Mozilla, which are often the target of (mostly, not always) undeserved criticism and mistrust on this site.
My own take here is: Yes, the post is objectively accurate. They are clearly doing A/B testing on different discount rates for their VPN Plus plan. And yes the PetersonProton post on reddit is inaccurate, and calling this unintended or accidental is objectively false based on the evidence in OP’s post. And after looking him up, he’s basically the highest ranking employee in the Proton VPN division, so he definitely should have known better. But I don’t think it’s that big of a deal. A/B testing prices at random isn’t inherently bad or deceptive - the only story here is that Peterson either lied about it or was grossly misinformed about his own product, neither of which is a great look. But neither of them say to me that Proton itself is a bad company, especially considering all the genuine good they’ve done overall.
Also just to avoid being a hypocrite: My own conflict of interest is that I use ProtonMail as a free user as my primary (but not only) email provider, and use Proton Authenticator too, though I’m potentially looking to switch away from that one. I don’t use any other Proton products, including Proton VPN, though I used and abandoned Standard Notes in the past. I also believe that the general vitriol toward Proton regarding their CEO is largely a gigantic overreaction that often relies on making incredibly disingenuous or misinformed accusations - like I think there’s exactly 0 basis to consider the company Trump- or MAGA-aligned.
Thank you for a good breakdown of the topic. By all means caveat emptor in this situation, but the openness of where and what the issue is helps in separating this as some other company’s PR move to win over anyone. It helps to be a possible result, but the post is a bit more in depth than “they’re bad, we’re better”. If an informed customer comes over to your product, that’s win-win.
B4 you continue replying to me, read everything I have replied to, esp. the Wikipedia entries I gave you.
It is precisely the fact that no neutral third party discovered this, but a competitor instead, that in lies the conflict. A simple reverse psychology to price fix could be at play here, that I am not going get myself involved in.
This is my third and last warning to dissociate me from their accusations. I only came to show a FHF user how to crosspost when URLs are incorrect, and !privacy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
I am not going to educate you on ethics and CoI further. Find someone else to teach you ethics, CoI, and politics.
I’m sure you don’t care, but if you sound like a combination pocket-mulching, militant-vegan, cycling purist, those are the only people who are going to hear what you have to actually say.
That might be your target market, in which case, congrats i suppose.
That level of condescension and pretension is pretty difficult to overcome, especially in a text only format, intentional or not.
…i don’t know what that means?
Looked familiar though, so i looked him up, is there some significance to a picture of hegseth pointing ?