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.
Am I the only one who doesn't think this is that big a deal? Its weird to deny it when directly questioned about it, but what's wrong with market testing pricing changes?
I don't use Proton, but this looks like different prices for a discount off the normal price. Like handing out $5 coupons at the one supermarket compared to $7 coupons at another.
Yes, its used to A/B test what users are willing to pay, but so what?
Proton doesnt have a great track record when it comes to the truth in general. Since them being a privacy focused vendor, it becomes a point of contention for most sane customers
Them lying about it is just fuel for the dumpster fire that proton is
So if you had subscribed at the higher price without knowing about this, but a little later would find out that if you had refreshed the page or had come back to the very same page later, you could have paid less, you would not be angry and just be happy to keep paying the higher price?
Yeah, people have a hate-boner against the best of companies all the time.