Windscribe (@Windscribe)
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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. 1/5🧵
Conflict of interest note: Windscribe is commercial open source VPN service provider based in Canada.

ex A ex B
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.
PetersonProton📸 of a reddit comment
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.
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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.

XP

  • nofate@piefed.socialEnglish
    3·
    3 hours ago

    Another comment by Peterson: https://safereddit.com/r/ProtonVPN/comments/1vhcp0c/proton_vpn_charges_more_when_using_safari_vs/p2qh8wl/#p2qh8wl

    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.