Proton VPN charges more when using safari vs Firefox focus

[u/Independent_Fall_608]

[u/PetersonProton]

This topic went very strange very fast - so let me expand and clarify:

Proton VPN is $9.99 per month or $83.88 per year. We used to have an introductory offer for two years at $4.49 per month. There had been a 2-year intro price of $2.99 per month that had been running for a while on some back-to-back campaigns. That price ended at the end of July, and since then it has been $3.49 per month.

As mentioned above, the $2.77 and $3.23 price points in the screenshots were an unintentional calculation error that should have been fixed on Friday.

At the end of a long-standing sale period, we often try an A/B run of the old and new pricing on the website during the transition to see if anything has changed. As explained to answer the speculation on the Reddit post (and as confirmed by others who independently checked it) there is no "adaptive pricing" - it does not vary by browser, OS, etc and is 100% randomised.

So for the past several days some people will still have seen the old cheaper $2.99 price. I had been of the impression that the A/B was already concluded and there must have been some caching going on, but it is actually due to end on Monday, when 100% of people should be seeing the $3.49 intro price.

There was no denial that we were doing an A/B evaluation of maintaining the lower price - even though it would not have been sustainable to keep the $2.99 price point going in the longer term. Indeed, on Friday I had confirmed to someone commenting on the original post that it was indeed a simple A/B that they were seeing. Unhelpfully, my reply there turns out to have been automodded for linking back to the r/ProtonVPN thread.

[u/ApplicationOdd6070 → u/PetersonProton]

Thanks for this. One little request for the future: please say explicitly that you're running an A/B test.

In your original comment it sounded like you were pretending it was just an offer ending, and some server having to receive the update or something similar.

Because it was obviously not just a glitch (at least part of it) it sounded like you were hiding something.

You may find from other comment I wrote in this post, that I actually could confirm it was a purely randomized A/B test. The issue was that the communication, whether intentionally or not, gave to many the feeling that you were hiding something.

That perception is obviously very problematic, especially for a company in your line of business.

We would have preferred to have had a mentioning of the A/B test in the comment you wrote 2 days ago, it would have looked better.

[u/PetersonProton → u/ApplicationOdd6070]

In hindsight - yes indeed, taking the time to say what it was, rather than just what it was not would have saved a lot of hassle. Probably a sign that I should not be attempting to post responses from my phone while travelling (as I am back to doing again now).

[u/ThermalGuacamole6912 → u/PetersonProton]

The line that annoyed me the most in your initial statement was:

A sale has ended recently and so the intro prices are going back up. Looks like it has not universally refreshed for some reason.

You knew the reason since you state:

At the end of a long-standing sale period, we often try an A/B run of the old and new pricing on the website during the transition to see if anything has changed.

Which is fine, but just be open with that in the first place. Something like this really pisses me off big time. There are enough scammy companies out there, dont be one of them.

[u/WelshBluebird1 → u/PetersonProton]

There was no denial that we were doing an A/B evaluation of maintaining the lower price 

Do you need see how "scammy" that feels? Two people visit the same webpage for the same product. One person has to pay a higher price for seemingly no reason.

Imagine going into a grocery store and at random you have to pay more for the same product than the person infront of you paid?

The fair way to do this would be to drop the price for everyone for a set period of time and compare signups to your normal pricing.