It is not easy. In the beginning we had a website that offered both standalone version and a subscription on the same page. It is easy for HN people to make this decision but we had hundreds of customers purchasing both, most of them having no idea what is the different between license and subscription.
Since the purchase-separate-license-for-each-platform-and-host-data-yourself requires more expertise, it made sense to make it less visible and make the subscription option to be default.
> You guys used to make features that would explicitly avoid server side decryption.
All encryption is still performed on the client side. In fact, with 1Password service we went overboard and now encrypting much more data on the client side than we used to.
We also added a separate Secret Key that makes sure the encryption strength does not depend on the master password alone (many people still use pretty weak master passwords).
Your website has no obvious way on how to buy the standalone version now. It's pretty obvious through behavior that it's a deprecated mode without stating it outright.
Most people can deduce it's an official PR position to deny the behavior that is being shown, like your doing right now.
But please, just be honest and say it's deprecated. Or start supporting the on-prem users again & ask for a software maintenance fee. None of this on the fence stuff. One guy that I have seen that has done it out right is this one: http://www.keyboard-and-mouse-sharing.com/maintenance.htm
Once deprecation enforcement starts becoming too much, those users are going to go away. A chunk of these customers don't want to do that although, because just paying the $24/year is cheaper than the time and hassle it would take to switch to something else. You could even combine it with the cloud version and just let people choose. But they are not going to chose that if they know on-prem is still deprecated.
You guys used to make features that would explicitly avoid server side decryption, like watchtower. We want that back.