[mhitza]

I can give you one bad experience example from a couple years back. Signed up to Protonmail to test out how well it works when you try to use it anonymously, paid for a year via crypto, then at some point stopped using it.

When I came back to it later, and my subscription had expired, instead of downgrading my account to the free version, they wouldn't allow me to access any of my emails until I renewed my account for another year.

[j-bos]

I have proton and remember reading that as well. Paid accounts have additional features (aliases, extra addresses) that will be disabled. The reasoning is to prevent them from being reused by maliciously. Iirc, the conditions were clearly spelled out, same as the fact that mail is encrypted and can only be recovered by the user.