Not being able to choose a country outside the one I currently live makes it useless for me. This is what made me drop proton (and yeah I know they don’t really care if they lose me if I’m not paying, but I pay for my current vpn and would’ve done for proton if they hadn’t made this change)
Egress (data transfer) fees being higher when going outside of a region would be one reason.
Sounds like a r/choosingbeggers post
I see no free options besides the US
I don’t use ProtonVPN (free) anymore since I don’t have the need for it. When I used it, it was awesome, in particular as it provided essentially full functionality (for me) while being free.
One issue was that about 30% or so of (free) servers had often been (temporarily) blocked by certain websites or possibly CDNs.
For that reason, it was always trial and error for me to select a server/country…and usually after 2-3x trying servers I found one that worked. Saying, when I was using ProtonVPN it was a requirement for me to select servers, otherwise it would have been useless.
I do understand that “serious users” who rely on a VPN should/are likely to pay for it, but I do not think that taking away this feature now (even if just for the free version) has any “benefit” whatsoever.
u/protonvpn, I was a free user and I can understand the desire to encourage free/trial users to make the transition into paying customers. Your objective is understandable, but the way you did it is clumsy. Springing it on users without an (honest) explanation left me (and clearly others) wondering what had happened. You also didn’t mention these changes in the release notes. (I wouldn’t call that honest.)
This “feature” has forced my version to cycle through EIGHT different servers because I could not choose a different one and I had to sit through it struggling to connect.
Because it’s expensive.
Proton is a for profit company and they are gonna do their best to make people switch to their paid plans. Be greatful they are at least providing a good + free tier plan unlike the other free vpns out there.
this really does suck lol
Weird. This “can’t pick free countries in the latest update” post seems to have been doing the rounds since before Christmas. I originally signed up for a free plan back in October and right from the start it was five countries (USA, Japan, Poland, Netherlands and Romania) assigned randomly. I assumed that it had always been that way and didn’t see a problem with it. I usually ended up with the Netherlands or the USA and it was always fast. When I had a project that needed a Polish or Japanese IP address I just clicked “Change Server” once or twice and made sure to stay connected.
I wanted more countries and more of the other VPN Plus goodies, so I bought it. But the free version did everything I needed from a performance and privacy perspective.
There’s been 10 updates to the Android app and 4 updates to the Windows app since then. It’s now almost March and people are still commenting about this “new” thing. Are you all really only updating your software every 5+ months?
This is the worst update possible for free users to force them to pay.
I myself don’t have money to pay for a service I probably use a few times a month to access content that is locked behind another rejoin , i.e. Japan.
Now that’s gone I can’t even watch Japan Exclusive shows anymore on Netflix and it’s basically a DAMN GAMBLE to even land on a Japan server.
What’s the point of using this VPN if I’m just being restricted so much?
What a bunch of garbage. I live in Germany and have accounts to pay bills in the USA that block all foreign IP addresses, so the auto connect to the Netherlands is 100% useless. And it’s not like I’m bogging down their servers every day, more like 15 minutes a month, so save your righteous capitalism-praising for someone else. The thing to do is take the money I’m now forced to pay to a different VPN, and spread the word that Proton is now crap. Popular outrage stopped Wendy’s from doing that surge pricing, after all. 
I was going to hate because I had an OG free account and a more recent free account for a different device. The newer accounts always connected me to Netherlands which sucked, so OG with the options to select individual cities in USA rocked. It seems with this update it always connects me to the closest fastest server which is USA, which is what I’ve been wanting anyway. So thanks now new free accounts are fine by me anyway. Free is free.
So, it is a case where you have to keep trying to log in? If, for example, we’d like to be connected to the US server; and we try once, and we get – I guess – Poland … do we try again to get the US? Or, is that never possible?
Good time to turn off auto updates. Not sure if it would of worked tho on iPhone to have them off or not
they want you to use a different vpn
It always wants to auto connect me to the Netherlands, and it says it’s the closest server to me but I’m in the United States? I have no other way of connecting aside from tapping the quick connect button with zero choice of where I connect.
Well, it was free so can’t complain, but it’s such a shame that I cannot pick a particular free country such as the US. The UK government bans certain online radio stations because they are funded by countries the UK government has decided they don’t like. But I like to listen to one and I could through a US based server. (Funny how the land of the free doesn’t ban these stations, but the UK does!)
As it happens it seems that the Dutch have not banned the certain radio station, so so far I’m good.
Any company who’d make such a drastic, sneaky change resulting in an entirely different user experience without any heads-up or announcement cannot be trusted. It doesn’t matter if the service was free or the most expensive vpn on the planet. What would they do if you decided to upgrade and pay more? Experiment with their customers at will? This is terrible customer service and I don’t think they value their users at all.