Does someone know the organizational structure of Proton and Tutanota? How democratic is it? How hierarchical is it? How are decisions made? How are tasks determined and distributed?

You want to apply for a job or just curious?

I was thinking about incentives and motivations. Are they motivated by profits?

I was also thinking about how sometimes listening to everyone in a team can save them from failure. Do Proton and Tutanota listen to everyone?
- I'm pretty sure tutanota is just another company with employees doing their boring 9 to 5 job. They have an admirable goal, but I'm not too fond of how they go about it (the whole "use our app, the browser or bust" is, all things considered, a pretty big mistake IMHO), and the people from tutanota I have interacted with didn't strike me as specifically "driven".
  
  I can't speak for proton, however. I have used it, it also doesn't let people use email clients. So, maybe it's better than tutanota, probably, I guess. On the other hand, tutanota has their app on f-droid, and proton doesn't.
  
  Either way, if they really cared about E2EE and email, they would have extended the existing, instead of reinventing the wheel. Yes, it's harder. But it would actually foster natural transitioning of users over time, and it would make a deep, lasting impact, instead of essentially being a "proprietary platform" with apps (open source or not).
Not OP. But I’m personally curious about the question regarding how decisions are made, but with more focus from the perspective of user experience. As in, how do they decide which features to focus on?

While I’m a fan of Proton, sometimes they seem to be doing too many things simultaneously, which is good but I worry them spreading themselves thin.

How do they do user experience research, especially with many people in the privacy community usually turning telemetry off? What do they rely on to make decisions about features and user experience? Do surveys work for them? Who make the decisions afterwards?

Ok, so I just read upon Proton AG, the company behind Proton, and they don't seem to owe investors money, because it was originally crowdfunded and now it finances itself with subscriptions. That sounds great! It is quite different to surveillance capitalism and enshittification (given that enshittification requires advertisers).

I am not advertising for Proton, by the way. To make that clear, I still wouldn't use them because they seem to have very limited VPN functionality in their Linux clients. As a Linux user, I wouldn't want that. However, if they fix that in the future, I could consider switching.

Edit: Similarly, I found this website https://www.ethicalconsumer.org/company-profile/tutao-gmbh summarizing its evaluation of Tutanota as ethical. It takes into consideration its ownership structure. Unfortunately, I cannot find details because there is a paywall for the information, but it could be the case that Tutanota does not owe money to investors and therefore is not seeking to maximize profits but rather provide a good service while compensating fairly its workers. I wish I could have more evidence.

I like that, if I only need mail with 20gb of storage, Tutanota is cheaper.

I don't know what to do. I'll have to think a bit longer.

can't it be democratic and hierarchical?

does one exclude the other?

That's not what OP said, they're asking for two different metrics without any implication about dependency.
Not necessarily :)

Proton is no hero.

Edit: Because of their aggressive monetization, not a bad product I just susoect it will keep getting more expensive.

an activist who is considered an eco-terrorist by the french state uses protonmail without any precautions and it's proton's fault that he left traces?
- Wooooah. No I just meant Proton charges a lot and offers sales and coupons that in fine print are not really great deals. I think Proton is a secure service, it's just little annoyances I have with their aggressive af monetization.
Why?
- I think prolly because of this https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/business/protonmail-scandal-tarnishes-swiss-privacy-reputation-/46952640
Hence my question :) If there are investors waiting for returns, you bet (and, like, actually, you do in fact bet) they will get more expensive. If it's a social enterprise, I wouldn't worry as much.