What I mean is if you depend on paid services for things like email or your password manager, you have to be able to guarantee that you will always be able to pay for it or else you will be locked out of that critical service to some extent. For example if you were to sign up for Tutanota and have one email for personal use, another for healthcare, and another for banking, and then at some point you are either in a tough financial spot or your payment method gets lost or stolen, you might lose your email for critical services.
Simple login doesn't have this issue because they promise that even if you stop paying you get to keep the aliases you've made. But most services don't operate like that.
I know the default answer would be "what are the odds you won't be able to afford $10 a month". For context I am poor and have always been poor, so it's very easy for me to understand that even if I become successful there will always be the possibility that I might lose everything, and the whole point of security is preparing for when bad things happen, even if they don't.
I'm curious if anyone else shares this opinion, because I haven't heard anyone else in the privacy space talk about it. Probably because most prominent people aren't dirt poor and don't factor that into their threat model.
If you stop paying for Proton you simply drop down to the free plan.
To clarify: you have to pre-emptively cancel before it expires, otherwise it auto renews and they invoice you. If you don't pay in 30 days, you get locked out.
Best practice is buy like 1 year (or however long you can) in advance, then click cancel, and you will still have the remainder of the year, and there will be a big red text on the top of the page nagging you, but it will not auto renew.
Edit: Phrasing
You said "no" but none of that contradicts what I said.
Lol, I thought you meant like "it automatically downgrades" which was what I meant by "no", because its not automatic.
I'm not completely sure how it is on proton, but on tuta you can only have one free email address at a time. So if you make more then one on a premium account and then stop paying, eventually your other emails will be disabled. I'm not sure if they just get deactivated until you resubscribe or if they get completely deleted, but either way for critical services that's a big issue.