Your Gmail account now has a value.

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Nothing in life is truly free, and that includes your Google and Gmail accounts. A new report has just put a dollar value on you, with some accounts worth as much as $180,000. It turns out your privacy has a price — and it’s big.

This is the “price of ‘free’ Gmail,” Proton told me, directing me to its new report on “what advertisers pay" to reach users. "Google has a price for you," says the company behind Gmail competitor Proton Mail. "We found it.”

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Proton analyzed "over 54,000 demographic profiles using 2025 ad auction data to estimate what advertisers pay to reach different types of Americans.” The price points for different users is stark. While the average user “generates about $1,605 a year in advertising value,” if you’re 35 to 44 years of age, living in Bozeman without kids and using a desktop, that figures soars to $17,929.30.

At the other end of the scale, “an 18- to 24-year-old father in Fort Smith, AR, using an Android phone and making low-value searches, generates $31.05. That’s a 577x difference between two people using the same free service.”

Proton Mail trades on its privacy and security creds, which makes it a very different proposition to Google in general and Gmail in particular. The company says these estimates are for “advertiser demand for access to a given profile,” and do not directly reflect “the exact revenue Google receives from any individual user.”

But that said, “the cost-per-click figures reflect live market rates drawn from aggregated, anonymized pricing data across active campaigns — what advertisers actually pay to reach these demographics in Google’s auction system.”

Your Google account makes the job of creating a profile easy, Proton says. “Google doesn’t just build a profile from the information you knowingly provide. If you sign up for services, click ads, or ignore others, that creates signals the system can use to infer much more than you realize. It can start with age or interests, then expand into assumptions about income, family status, political leanings, or religion.”

There are some interesting stats in the research. A desktop user is worth five-times as much as an Android user. iPhone users are three times as valuable as Android users. “Desktop signals professional context and transaction readiness. iPhone signals premium consumer spending. Android signals lower expected conversion.”

You are most valuable when you’re between 35 and 44 and then drop as you age, while “non-parents are worth approximately 17% more on average.” All that additional free cash. “Once a profile is flagged as a parent, it gets shifted from $6-per-click wealth management ads to $2-per-click ads for minivans and preschools.”

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Bottom line, over ten years “the average American represents roughly $16,050 in ad value. The most monetized profiles approach $180,000. With 1.8 billion active Gmail users," Proton says, "the long-term value of keeping users in the ecosystem is enormous, and it scales with every additional year of behavioral data.”

When it comes to free services from Google and others, you have long known you’re the product. Now you know what that product is actually worth.