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.
This is a huge problem. When Amazon.com got caught running price tests on their customers, Jeff Bezos himself apologized for the mistake.
How far have we fallen that Proton, a company that needs to be transparent to earn its users trust, can be this opaque… And then when they’ve finally been caught, lie about it?
If I got overcharged and found out later, I would be more than a little upset. In fact, I’ve refunded a Proton plan before due to a similar pricing mixup. And the requirements to refund are borderline draconian, including a bold"Refunds can only be requested once per user"
I don’t like any of this, but A-B price testing is VERY different from individual targeted pricing, which is what Amazon was doing.
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You didn’t not say it, too. ☝🏼
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You said it was the only problem.
Yep. My problem is the crux of the matter. Nailed it.
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