Proton's decade-long bet against Big Tech productivity monopolies.
Scientists who met at CERN built an encrypted email service in 2014. Twelve years later, it is a full open-source workspace suite taking on Google and Microsoft.
Proton just officially launched Proton Meet and Proton Workspace. On the surface, it is another video conferencing tool and another office bundle. But zoom out, and the trajectory tells a different story.
Here is what Proton has built, piece by piece, over the past decade:
- 2014: Proton Mail - encrypted email
- 2017: Proton VPN - first VPN provider to go fully open source
- 2020: Proton Drive - encrypted cloud storage
- 2020: Proton Calendar - encrypted scheduling
- 2023: Proton Pass - open-source password manager
- 2024: Proton Docs - real-time collaborative documents, end-to-end encrypted
- 2025: Proton Sheets - encrypted spreadsheets
- 2026: Proton Meet - video conferencing with end-to-end encryption via the MLS protocol
Every app is open source. Every app has been independently audited. The code is on GitHub for anyone to inspect.
That is not a product launch. That is a long-term strategy to build a sovereign alternative to the two dominant productivity monopolies, component by component.
What makes this worth watching:
The encryption is not bolted on. Proton Meet uses MLS, an open standard that encrypts every participant's audio and video individually, meaning not even Proton's own servers can access the conversation. This is architecturally different from Zoom or Teams adding encryption as a premium feature.
Proton operates under Swiss and EU law, outside US CLOUD Act reach and fully within GDPR scope. For European organizations still running sensitive meetings on US-hosted platforms, that distinction is vital.
Proton Workspace now bundles Mail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, Sheets, Meet, VPN, and a password manager. A premium tier adds their AI assistant Lumo. While the models remain proprietary, all prompts are encrypted before leaving the browser processed on Proton-owned servers in Europe, and erased immediately after. No logs, no training on user data.
Proton Meet is free for up to 50 participants and 60-minute meetings, no account required.
This is an early look, not a full review. There are legitimate questions around scalability, admin controls, and migration tooling that only hands-on evaluation can answer.
But the strategic direction is clear. While most privacy-focused tools remain niche single-purpose applications, Proton is betting that organizations will eventually want an entire productivity stack where encryption and open source are the default, not the exception.
They are at 100 million users and over 100,000 enterprise customers. The question is whether the switching cost from Google and Microsoft remains too high, even when the sovereignty argument is this strong.
