But 1Password previously had the option to _not_ use their cloud, and they deliberately killed it to push people onto their subscription offering. So I think in the context of a conversation about how financial conditions will force changes which change the customer experience, I think it's entirely fair to compare them to a non-cloud option.

>they deliberately killed it to push people onto their subscription offering

There are things available via the Cloud version that aren't available with local vaults and, in order to maintain those, they decided not to put the time into implementing those changes for local vaults. Local vault users are less than 1% of their user base.

How is that not deliberately pushing people to move to a subscription model?

Parent comment said they killed it. They didn't kill it. You can still use local vaults currently. You won't be able to any more in newer versions because they're no longer at feature parity. Killing it to push people to the subscription model implies malice.

The cloud part of a password manager can easily be handled by any file sync service, which are free and indistinguishable in quality from 1password.

Generally agree but there are important edges where that breaks down: shared vaults, one time access, posthominis access, etc.

Well played! It's like Dropbox all over again.

Maybe for technical people.

Wouldn't KeePass + syncthing be just as ubiquitously available, with more security?

Yes, especially nowadays that sync errors are not commonplace. I use it with Nextcloud. But that still requires you setting up your own thing, which is why people like 1password and bitwarden.

Bitwarden has free hosted accounts, they just don't have all features enabled. Most notably, you can't store attachments.

Bitwarden is free for personal accounts.