this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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This comparison makes no sense.
Signal doesn't have payment data. It's not a paid service. Proton is a paid subscription service and that payment data needs to be accessible in order to charge the user and they're not a payment processor.
Not only, Proton deletes the information of your payment method if you delete it from your account.
Unfortunately the only real private solution remains to self-host.
The fact that it's a paid service doesn't mean they have to keep your PID and payment info on file. I use posteo.de for my email, which is a paid service. But my payment info is only used during the payment process and they don't keep it on file once they receive the payment. You buy like 12 or 20 months and have that many credits. When it starts to get low, you buy some more.
Proton let me delete the payment information between charges, but they certainly made it a painful process. I had to email support
Interesting system! Correct me if I'm wrong though, but buying credits does look like it's not an automatically recurring payment (to buy credits), so that makes sense (they do keep the receipts though according to their privacy policy. Decoupled from the account, but they do keep data).
That's a bit different from Proton's credit card payment method (which is the case here) that automatically recurs. If Posteo offered automatically recurring payments, they'd have to save payment data as well (which they also explain in the privacy policy).
To be clear, Proton does also offer more private ways of paying. Paying by credit card is not the only option. Bitcoin or cash is also possible. I just found out that Proton does also actually offer a credit system as well, but it's unclear to me if that's decoupled or not. Definitely a place where they could do better.
Right, it's not automatically recurring. If you get below some number of credits (I forget how many), they notify you (by email of course!) so you have plenty of time to buy some more.
What if a user donates to Signal?
Not sure, they do seem to store something (pretty unclear what though), but I'm guessing that can be fully decoupled from a user's account, since it's unrelated to the actual service.
What if I buy Signal Nitro