I’d it was simply storage, the. It would be an add on, but it’s not. It seems like it’s more of a strategy to increase cash flow by converting to ongoing subscriptions instead of one time purchases. This is the same motivation that switched MS Office and Photoshop over to subscriptions. There’s no compelling reason to upgrade, so you get people to fork over a credit card and forget about their reoccurring charge. Cash flow becomes more predictable and possibly increases as well. This why service contract / subscription businesses are popular among investors.
I don’t blame them for trying it, but let’s not pretend this is good for users.
The truth is that my grandmother needs a password manager and she barely understands what minimizing a window does. "Just store your vault in dropbox" is friction and that matters much more to the huge majority of users than the fact that the vault is stored on a cloud service.
Yes, completely agree. Dropbox sync has lots of gotchas and edge cases, and was particularly bad if you edited files on multiple systems (my workstation and laptop, for instance -- I use both interchangeably depending on what I'm doing).
I can understand why 1Password built their own sync service instead of playing whack-a-mole with different cloud storage providers' quirks.
Anyways all of that said, the 3rd party sync solutions all suffered from varying degrees of funkiness that just don’t exist with the native solution. Their switching to monthly pricing was, objectively, very successful and didn’t cost majority of users more money. But there are a small number of people who it rubbed the wrong way, clearly, but any business action is bound to piss some small number of people.
So? You can put the database on gdrive, icloud, dropbox, or any cloud service you want. I think most users understand the concept of creating a file, putting stuff in it, and putting it on a file syncing service (or usb drive).
Many do, many don't.
Even for those that do, there is a significant hassle in getting a file sharing service (gdrive, icloud, dropbox) etc onto every possible device they have.
I mean, I'm with you in that I'm personally pretty skeptical of the cloud-based pw solution. But I can absolutely understand the story about a much simpler user-experience that it offers.
What is this "significant hassle"? Surely it's not that much harder to install [sync app] + [password app] than it is to install [password app]?
>Many do, many don't.
I suspect the intersection between "people who don't know how to manipulate files" and "people who care enough about passwords and are willing to fork over $36/yr" isn't big.
It's literally twice as much work. Often more, because I need the password to the sync app's service. Where's that stored?
How many characters is it? Oh, it's a secure, 20-32 character password. What a pain to re-type it. Good thing it uses a ton of symbols which are a pain to type on my mobile keyboard.
> I suspect the intersection between "people who don't know how to manipulate files" and "people who care enough about passwords and are willing to fork over $36/yr" isn't big.
It's not "people who don't know how to manipulate files", it's "people who don't _like_ to manipulate files, and external services, and get them onto all of their devices".
Further, I expect the proportion of the first circle is constant and relatively small (<10%).
I expect the proportion of the second circle _was_ small, but is growing extremely rapidly.
Or no app, just add the browser extension and you're done. Seems a lot easier to me than downloading two other apps, one I have no use for other than syncing the other one.
Some people don't want to roll their own. You may, or may not agree with the concept of a fully managed solution, but for any non technical user, they want it to (borrow a phrase) "just work".
It's the majority of the addressable market.
The cloud synced updating features you're talking about work fine for me already with 1Password's iCloud-backed syncing, which is how most Mac and iOS apps sync data, it's just in that model Apple has control of my data, not 1Password (and I don't pay a subscription fee), so they make it incredibly difficult to configure that way.
Yes.
Note also I'm replying to this comment "It’s cloud-based because the majority of password management users want automatic cross-device updates without setting up their own server." Seems relevant that "cross-device updates" don't require a server (at least among Apple devices)?
> The only reason they went to the cloud is because most people were buying one copy and sharing it with multiple people.
It’s cloud-based because the majority of password management users want automatic cross-device updates without setting up their own server.