Tutanota, an end-to-end encrypted email service located in Germany, says it’s seeing an “exponential” uptick in sign-ups — crediting this to growing awareness of and concern for privacy online for a variety of (often political) reasons.
The freemium, open source encrypted email service exited beta back in March 2015 — with a mission to broaden access to end-to-end encryption vs extant options like PGP that can be too complex for mainstream users to adopt. Tutanota uses RSA and AES encryption, and monetizes via premium tiers — offering paid extras for those who want things like additional storage.
Blogging about a growth trend it says started in the second half of 2016 — but claims has “really taken off recently” — co-founder Matthias Pfau cites data from Alexa Page Rank showing the email service gained around 32,000 page ranks over the past two month, at the same time as other privacy conscious tools, such as the DuckDuckGo private search engine, also saw their rankings rise. So he’s calling 2017 “the start of the privacy-era”.
He’s not attributing Tutanota’s user growth to any single event, such as the election of President Trump in the US, but argues it’s down to a combination of political events and issues which are driving more people to seek privacy-protecting alternatives to safeguard their communications from being parsed by third parties.
“[As well as the election of Trump] also the radicalization of politics in Turkey — and other countries (France, Austria, Netherlands, Brexit & UK surveillance laws) play into it,” he suggests, when asked to what he attributes rising sign-up rates. “As Tutanota is also available in French and Turkish, it is very easy for people there to protect their private communication.”
He tells TechCrunch the email service now has more than 2 million users — which is up from a million a year ago, and around 1.5M at the start of this year. It’s adding more than 200,000 new users per month, he says.
Another European e2e encrypted Gmail alternative reports rising signups
The freemium, open source encrypted email service exited beta back in March 2015 — with a mission to broaden access to end-to-end encryption vs extant options like PGP that can be too complex for mainstream users to adopt. Tutanota uses RSA and AES encryption, and monetizes via premium tiers — offering paid extras for those who want things like additional storage.
Blogging about a growth trend it says started in the second half of 2016 — but claims has “really taken off recently” — co-founder Matthias Pfau cites data from Alexa Page Rank showing the email service gained around 32,000 page ranks over the past two month, at the same time as other privacy conscious tools, such as the DuckDuckGo private search engine, also saw their rankings rise. So he’s calling 2017 “the start of the privacy-era”.
He’s not attributing Tutanota’s user growth to any single event, such as the election of President Trump in the US, but argues it’s down to a combination of political events and issues which are driving more people to seek privacy-protecting alternatives to safeguard their communications from being parsed by third parties.
“[As well as the election of Trump] also the radicalization of politics in Turkey — and other countries (France, Austria, Netherlands, Brexit & UK surveillance laws) play into it,” he suggests, when asked to what he attributes rising sign-up rates. “As Tutanota is also available in French and Turkish, it is very easy for people there to protect their private communication.”
He tells TechCrunch the email service now has more than 2 million users — which is up from a million a year ago, and around 1.5M at the start of this year. It’s adding more than 200,000 new users per month, he says.
Another European e2e encrypted Gmail alternative reports rising signups