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.
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