Proton's free tier is a step to right direction, and at least they don't run a huge advertisement company that could benefit from the free tier users' data. And if you pay for Proton Unlimited, you also get access to SimpleLogin's Premium tier which is nice. I just found this out when I finally bit the bullet and changed away from Gmail over to Proton. Now I don't have to expose my real email address to some random never-to-be-seen-again websites or campaigns if I don't want to.

If one has enough motivation, time and interest in purchasing their own domain, you can get one step forward with changing away from Gmail. Then you can pay something like 5€/month for Proton Mail Plus, use your own domain as your email address and if one day you find a better email provider, you could just change the MX records for that service and wouldn't have to go through all your accounts and update the new address to all the places.

I had pondered moving away from Gmail years and years ever since I found out Google doesn't have any real customer support and HN had stories where people had suddenly been locked out of their Google accounts because of some silly reason and couldn't get their accounts back without some inside connections. At one point most of my digital life was at the mercy of Google and losing access to my Gmail or Google Calendar or G Drive would have been a disaster. Reading all these web-DRM news reminded me that I should continue de-googlefying my life and finally made the change. Firefox has been my primary browser for years and I moved over to iPhone with my phone.