free plan is definitely not worth switching to;

You short think of it as a primarily paid service with a free trial, not a “free, but with paid subscription for extra stuff” type of deal

they even go as far as to attach an ad with a referral link to all of your outbound mail on the free tier (btw hiding the fact that this happens is kinda scummy but whatever; if you’re curious, it’s all the way at the bottom of the settings menu, and locked unless you pay up)

also, it defaults to proton.me, but some large websites including ph don’t accept these, protonmail.com addresses are a lot more reliable