Pretty typical for people here to be zoomed-in on the b2c side of a business because that's what they use, and fail to see the b2b side, the underwater mass of the iceberg.

I think people can see that this is targeting businesses, but they're not happy about that because they're non-business customers.

It doesn't bode well for the future direction of what has up to now been a good consumer-focused product.

Like how Dropbox has gone from "a folder that synchronizes your files" to "an electron app for having discussion threads about files" because that's what business customers want.

Hopefully the consumer marketshare has some influence on business decisions, which might make it worthwile for them to keep non-business customers. This kind of strategy certainly works for some professional software, which is often even free for students.

I suspect 1Password sees features like iCloud Keychain coming and is trying to grow into other markets because a "good enough" built-in password manager will significantly decrease their value proposition in the consumer space.

Not great if you like their product as a consumer, but 1Password's biggest feature differentiator right now is better family sharing than iOS provides. That could easily change in a future iOS version, and then it's suddenly a lot harder for 1Password to grow by selling a $60/year password manager subscription.

Enterprise features on the other hand, that's not something that OS vendors are likely to ship.

While I don't like the newer versions of Dropbox as much as the old ones, I can understand how pressure from iCloud and OneDrive pushed them toward enterprise features over consumer users.

> Enterprise features on the other hand, that's not something that OS vendors are likely to ship.

Maybe not on Mac, but MS will probably try.

If anything I'd bet on MS sticking it into their Office subscription, not Windows itself. So 1Password will be up against iCloud Keychain from Apple and Microsoft Passwords 365 on the enterprise front.

You are probably right.

Count on it.

Unlike many _other_ product companies, they all dogwood their own code. Also, IIRC all members of a team account are given a family account for their own use (you’d obviously have to convert if you separate from the company), so they are building for _people_.

Tangentially, I had read somewhere some years ago, that the Dropbox GUI clients on some or all of Linux, Windows and macOS were written in Python and wxPython. The one that you activate from the system tray, in the case of Windows, at least.

This may have overlapped with when Guido was working there, though they may have built those clients before he joined, of course.

I think it's a little weird. I have used 1password at two jobs, and thought it was great, so I bought it for myself. They want money to sync my passwords between my Windows desktop and my iPhone. Seems reasonable to me. I program computers for a living and people pay me.

I guess there was a free self-hosted type thing at one point in the past? That was before I ever heard of the product, so I'm not that upset that it's no longer advertised heavily or whatever.

I do have one complaint. They do have k8s secret management, which I would like to use for my personal cluster, but it's just too expensive for that. Very weird to show it in the UI and then when you try to use it, quote you an insanely high price. (I just use sealed-secrets instead. If my cluster blows up, it will be a very irritating weekend rotating all the secrets. But good to do, so meh.)

I used to use 1Password when they just sold the application at a fixed price and I handle all the synchronization between machines. That option is no longer available. I'm one of the users who left because of this.

Hmmm , I have a Mac and an iPhone and the fixed price application from circa 2015-16. They are still in sync via iCloud. I can see "Sync with Dropbox" and "Sync with WLAN server" in the settings. Did you mean any custom sync options that may have existed?

They used to offer synchronization via Dropbox. Is that still an option?

You can still sync via third party options but the entire desktop apps are view only if you don't pay for a subscription.

> They want money to sync my passwords between my Windows desktop and my iPhone. Seems reasonable to me.

Money for service is fine, but this is a long term thing, and I'm not going to pay $180 per 5 years to keep 100KB in sync. And the software doesn't justify that price either.

I like how you had to word it in terms of 5 years just to make it sound substantial...

It's 3 dollars a month.

You could be conservative with tissue paper and make up the difference to your monthly budget... so how much cheaper can you get that cheaper than tissue paper and still expect the service to be around forever.

Just 3 dollars a month… if every piece of software I use on a daily basis cost me a few dollars then the usage cost would spiral out of control.

Now many of us are software developers here on HN, so I understand the need to charge money for software. But I paid full price for 1Password6 years ago and I haven’t needed any updates to continue using it.

Now the company refuses to sell a non-subscription service version and I’m suppose to be thankful that they’re “only” charging $3 a month?

These types of subscriptions are purely highway robbery. I’d be happy to pay for upgrades if software needs to be updated to remain compatible with browser or OS updates, but let me decide whether I feel it’s necessary.

> Just 3 dollars a month… if every piece of software I use on a daily basis cost me a few dollars then the usage cost would spiral out of control.

This sounds so much pithier than it actually is, but of course every reply will say it.

Does 1Password asking for 3 dollars make every other app on your computer suddenly need 3 dollars a month?

Every piece of software needs its own plan for continued development.

Some software you use exists because people work on it for free, some exists because massive ad-tech companies defiling the globe's privacy fund it, etc.

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Paid subscriptions is one of those types, and as far as paid subscriptions go 3 dollars a month is bottom of the barrel.

Like if every paid subscription you had was 3 dollars how would your bills look?

Many MANY companies have tried one time payments and died over it. People are allergic to upfront payment. People just might not have the funds to pay a fair price all at once. A tech forum isn't exactly where to get perspective on that for example...

1Password clearly tried the one time payment model, and if I had to imagine for a second, I bet you one-time payment users ended up being some of their most expensive users since they had to manage disparate sync schemes.

Now at least subscription users can subsides that cost a bit...

> Every piece of software needs its own plan for continued development.

It does. But if we're talking about just the software, I don't think updates to an already-finished password manager are worth nearly that much.

Microsoft used to sell upgrades for their entire OS for $3 a month, released once every 3 years.

> already-finished password manager

No such thing.

If it was finished they'd close their doors and find a new way to make a living.

> Microsoft used to sell upgrades for their entire OS for $3 a month, released once every 3 years.

Great way to make my point. MS tried taking just 3 dollars a month for an entire OS, but because they were asking for money upfront they had to turn to a mixture advertising Candy Crush in the start menu and privacy abuse.

> If it was finished they'd close their doors and find a new way to make a living.

Well that's the big question with these services isn't it? Are they keeping their doors open because they have more value to provide? Or is this just a ruse to keep their doors open without any further value to provide?

If that's been the question this whole time, the answer is no, this is not just a ruse.

https://app-updates.agilebits.com/product_history/OPM7

They provide a reliable service that's never let me down when I needed it, have security updates and bug fixes, provide great support, track OS and hardware updates... not much more they need to do to justify existing.

> If it was finished they'd close their doors and find a new way to make a living.

Feature-complete, then. It needs updates but it doesn't need significant development work.

> Great way to make my point. MS tried taking just 3 dollars a month for an entire OS, but because they were asking for money upfront they had to turn to a mixture advertising Candy Crush in the start menu and privacy abuse.

They make most of their money off new computers at an even lower price. Adding candy crush and more tracking came after they switched to making upgrades free, and I really doubt it's worth $100 a seat.

They made home windows into a loss-leader. If there was a choice to pay to remove those things I bet they'd make somewhat more money. But it's not where their big revenue streams are so they don't care.

Again, software development companies have tried the "rely on people being willing to pay upfront for updates" and failed repeatedly

Once you get there it doesn't matter if your goal was features or updates, you're talking about closing doors and laying people off.

So I'd much rather 1password do exactly what they did and pivot off a failing model.

> They made home windows into a loss-leader.

That's great, and I'm sure when 1Password has a 100B war chest to sit on they'll think about doing the same.

Most people would consider turning your flagship into a loss-leader for other parts of the company not exactly the goal of the average software shop.

Retail home sales hadn't been a major revenue stream for microsoft in decades, if ever.

Windows is not a loss-leader. It makes them lots of money. They just threw away a single sales channel.

> pivot off a failing model

Microsoft hasn't pivoted off upfront sales for Windows.

So now we've gone from talking about 1Password to you correcting your own points about a diversion you brought up.

I just now realized you're the same person from the other thread and it all makes sense now, this was never about 1Password for you. My mistake taking the bait.

And of course, I vehemently agree with anything you say about 1Password, or Windows.

It's not a diversion to say that a password manager shouldn't cost as much as an operating system.

And if you don't like corrections then don't nitpick so much.

> People are allergic to upfront payment.

What? People in general are clamoring and highly prefer one-time payment. Approximately nobody wants a recurring charge every month.

Companies are pushing and forcing subscriptions only because the recurring revenue stream is what investors want to see. People don't want it.

Anecdotally, if you asked me to pay $30 up-front for a password manager, I would just keep using the same minimum-effort password for every site like I was doing a few years ago. Data-wise, we know that the largest drop-off during customer acquisition is when they have to input payment information.

IME most people don’t want to pay for anything at all. Which is partly why the subscription model works — try it for free for a month so you can understand the value proposition. Afterward, you’re more willing to pay for it.

> Does 1Password asking for 3 dollars make every other app on your computer suddenly need 3 dollars a month?

By your logic there’s nothing wrong with any other app asking for their own monthly toll when you feel that 1Password is justified in doing so.

> Like if every paid subscription you had was 3 dollars how would your bills look?

But 1Password never needed to be a subscription in the first place. I am still able to use 1Password6 to this day without any updates for the past 3 years. That’s $108 for software that I paid $30 originally.

> People are allergic to upfront payment. People just might not have the funds to pay a fair price all at once.

If they were truly worried about losing customers unwilling to pay upfront they’d offer both options. By forcing everyone to go subscription they see that they could have milked me for an additional $78+ without doing any work at all.

> I bet you one-time payment users ended up being some of their most expensive users since they had to manage disparate sync schemes. Now at least subscription users can subsides that cost a bit…

I don’t see why I should feel inclined to pay more to support some edge case users. I didn’t bemoan 1Password when they didn’t provide an update after Safari changed their API. I continued using the software in Firefox and Chrome.

Am I considered an “expensive user” simply because I’m unwilling to pay their toll? I haven’t gotten any support from them for the past 3 years.

We live in a capitalistic world and 1Password is free to go with whatever pricing model works for them to maximize their revenues. Likewise, I am free to warn people the poor value that they’re receiving with the current subscription model. I don’t have to aspire to be a reoccurring revenue stream to boost their $6.8B valuation…

> if every piece of software I use on a daily basis cost me a few dollars

Can I interest you in a cloud license for ls? It’s clearly critical you your day to day work, surely $5 per month it reasonable for a too, you use so frequently???

(Im a long time 1pw user and vocal supporter. I’m now wondering how they are going to generate the expected return in this investment, because I can’t see any realistic avenues for that which aren’t likely to fuck me and everybody I’ve recommended 1pw to in the last decade or so over…)

> I like how you had to word it in terms of 5 years just to make it sound substantial...

Because I'm going to be using it for that long.

> It's 3 dollars a month.

For this single app. It's easy to justify $3 at a time, but suddenly you're paying a whole cable bill for marginal value.

Decisions like this shouldn't be taken in complete isolation and rounded to zero.

> and still expect the service to be around forever

I don't want the service, just sell me the program.

I could store my data in dropbox or microsoft or any email service or facebook.

I could store it in S3 for 1 penny a month. I could pay 2/3 as much to get 100GB of space from google.

The amount of money it takes to provide this service is completely disconnected from the cost, and the value I get is not from the service.

The program is valuable, but I could buy a nice alternative program, avoid the pure-profit service, and buy myself something nice down the line. Maybe a higher tier GPU the next time I upgrade my computer. And I can only conserve so much tissue paper.

One $3-per-month service could hold my data for thousands of apps. It's reasonable to ask me to have one such service. But I'm not paying once per app.

> Because I'm going to be using it for that long.

Cool, I'm planning to use it for a lifetime. The point is that you didn't just use the monthly number because it's extremely low as far as paid software subscriptions go...

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And I don't do this:

> Decisions like this shouldn't be taken in complete isolation and rounded to zero.

So I don't end up worrying about:

> For this single app. It's easy to justify $3 at a time, but suddenly you're paying a whole cable bill for marginal value.

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> I don't want the service, just sell me the program.

First off you literally just said:

> Money for service is fine, but this is a long term thing, and I'm not going to pay $180 per 5 years to keep 100KB in sync.

So clearly you want the service but feel it's too expensive...

But secondly, software doesn't exist in a time bubble! Security updates, maintenance and support all exist and these are people trying to make a living while handling all that.

It's super cool that you want to get their hard work in the most personally beneficial way, but they have this very reasonably priced service that lets the people have the software, and them have their livelihood.

You can say "oh well I don't care about maintenance, I'll buy the new version if it's compatible with my OS", which again is super convenient for you... but once they hit plateaus in new users are they just supposed to pause development until old versions break?

If the utility of the program was so low you wouldn't be asking them for it without the service after all... if it's "just storing 100kb of text" there's plenty of other options out there.

10 cents a day for something that saves a lot of stress is a great price.

> So clearly you want the service but feel it's too expensive...

No, I don't. "Money for service" is fine as a principle. This particular service is something I don't want at all. Those can both be true at the same time.

> But secondly, software doesn't exist in a time bubble! Security updates, maintenance and support all exist and these are people trying to make a living while handling all that.

I'm happy to pay for software updates. But software is supposed to last more than 10-16 months. Which is how often you'd be paying a reasonable shelf price of 30-50 dollars. Generally software can be expected to last ten years without trouble.

> very reasonably priced service

What's your definition of reasonable here? $20 a month is a great deal if that's the price of security! So $20 a month would be reasonable by that metric. But I think we can both agree that's too high. So how do we decide? And it can't just be that low dollar amounts are automatically reasonable, because we're not rounding to zero.

> If the utility of the program was so low you wouldn't be asking them for it without the service after all... if it's "just storing 100kb of text" there's plenty of other options out there.

I'd say the utility of the program is worth a solid $30-50. The program does all the good stuff. The program isn't the service. The program manages my passwords, the service just syncs a tiny file.

I can get the same syncing UX in most password managers just by logging into an existing account I already have. The stress of that one-time login is nothing. It's less stress than making a new account for 1password.

> No, I don't. "Money for service" is fine as a principle

My mistake for assuming you were talking about the thing being talked about

> What's your definition of reasonable here? $20 a month is a great deal if that's the price of security! So $20 a month would be reasonable by that metric. But I think we can both agree that's too high. So how do we decide? And it can't just be that low dollar amounts are automatically reasonable, because we're not rounding to zero.

This entire paragraph is just asking me how to price software, which is already a very well covered topic and there's no answer that will fit in this comment (there's also no one person who knows a definitive answer to it).

I mean part of why $3 is reasonable compared to $20 is less sticker shock... why is there less sticker shock for $3 but there is for $20? Why $9.99 instead of $10?

> I'm happy to pay for software updates. But software is supposed to last more than 10-16 months. Which is how often you'd be paying a reasonable shelf price of 30-50 dollars. Generally software can be expected to last ten years without trouble.

This still boils down to "what I want" while ignoring the reality the creators face.

Like, software companies have gone with your reality, and before 10 years passes up and you feel like it's time to upgrade... they're gone!

What you don't seem to understand is that the sustainability of the company has a premium here.

It's not just $3 for passwords, it's $3 so I have confidence I'm not relying on 1password having indefinite growth to have people work there.

> My mistake for assuming you were talking about the thing being talked about

I said buying it is "fine". Even if that was directed specifically to this service, that doesn't mean I want it.

> there's also no one person who knows a definitive answer

Then don't be so insistent that the price is good.

> Like, software companies have gone with your reality, and before 10 years passes up and you feel like it's time to upgrade... they're gone!

I'm not saying they have to do it that way, I just think it's a reasonable way to calculate the price of the functionality.

If they want a steadier income that's fine, but wanting a full retail paycheck every single year is going too far.

> It's not just $3 for passwords, it's $3 so I have confidence I'm not relying on 1password having indefinite growth to have people work there.

On the other hand, worrying about whether companies will be around for the long term is a big reason I dislike subscriptions.

That $3 doesn't guarantee they'll still be around. And for a simple product like this, the more ambitious they get the more worried I get.

Also this company is an order of magnitude or two bigger than "sustainable". The only way they would stop selling a password manager is because of bad management or because they choose to pivot into a different market. They're not going to have insufficient money to pay the staff of their core product.

You've thrown any sort of internal consistency so far out the window at this point, I don't think you even know what you're saying anymore.

You start by implying there's something wrong with insisting on the quality of a price then...

> If they want a steadier income that's fine, but wanting a full retail paycheck every single year is going too far.

Right. So you're now you're not just saying that the subscription model is bad, you're saying that you've decided what a full retail paycheck for their software is.

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You say: > That $3 doesn't guarantee they'll still be around > for a simple product like this, the more ambitious they get the more worried I get. > Also this company is an order of magnitude or two bigger than "sustainable"

Yet it's all exactly the reason why this is true:

> They're not going to have insufficient money to pay the staff of their core product.

I mean how do you think 1Password reached the size where you're essentially calling them "too big to fail"?

They did the ramen noodle "sustainable" thing, and they'd be a footnote if they had stayed there. Instead they were ambitious, they scaled, they took people's money in a way that works for them, and now some internet person is simultaneously saying "They're so successful they'll never fail if they don't want to" and "Why are they doing what they did to reach that point???"

> Right. So you're now you're not just saying that the subscription model is bad, you're saying that you've decided what a full retail paycheck for their software is.

Did you forget that they used to sell it that way? And there are competitors with similar prices. We know what retail price is.

> "Why are they doing what they did to reach that point???"

I never asked that.

They raised their prices so they'd make more money, obviously.

When I say it's too expensive for me, that's not me being confused about why they charge that much.

I'd rather pay for a product plus some profits plus some scaling, and not pay for a product plus some profits plus extremely aggressive scaling.

They can both keep a company around for a long time, and the former might even be better for that.

Like you said a couple comments up, I want "confidence I'm not relying on 1password having indefinite growth to have people work there". The more they focus on very fast growth, the less I have of that confidence.

> I mean how do you think 1Password reached the size where you're essentially calling them "too big to fail"?

They reached a safe size before they switched to forcing subscriptions.

Take a look at BitWarden. It is very popular, has a good free tier, the premium plan is $10/year, and the family plan for six users is $3.33/month.

Not free that I was ever aware – it was a fixed-price app when I first got it – but you could store your vault on any network drive, and later Dropbox became the way to sync between mobile & desktop. But it was a bit tricky to set up with the extra auth & auth hassle and "now where did I put my vault?" issues. As much as I liked that approach, it's hard to deny the current cloud-based service is easier to get going with.

> Very weird to show it in the UI a

I thought this is a common pattern for assessing user interest. If you don't display it users don't know it is available.

Very common in A/B testing to show different variations of CTAs as well.

"Very weird to show it in the UI and then when you try to use it, quote you an insanely high price."

How much did they quote? (if you're able to share)

Oh, it's on their website. It's $30/month for "25 vault access credits". I have no idea what consumes a vault access credit, but didn't want to pay $30/month for a personal project.

(At my last job, I wrote something to rotate the passwords on our network equipment everyday. I just exec'd the 1password linux binary, and that was free. Why should I pay to integrate it with k8s?)

Yeah, we’ll, it sucks to pay for an app that is perfect and then have them ruin it because of their b2b aspirations. And raising money like this is just another link in the chain pulling them down into the pit of insanity that ruins the most-beloved password manager ever.

There's a chance that a push toward enterprise may even result in a feature a lot of us more savvy individual customers would love to see as well: self-hosting.

I think this underscores some (but not all!) of the negative reaction to "Zendesk plans to buy (the company behind) SurveyMonkey" — the latter of which has developed significant revenue streams from specific B2B products

True but if anyone could even casually be aware of and use terms like b2c and b2b it’s people on this forum right.

I was going to say something about “just use pgp and rsync”

Browser and mobile app auto fill are really key features for a password manager.

They have been doing some pretty unfriendly moves towards their long-term customers, like making sure the new 1Password cannot be used without 'the cloud' like the old one could be.

I have no doubt raising more VC money will only accelerate such trends.

In fact I've decided to move off of 1Password to BitWarden, since at least one can realistically self-host it. That being said, it's not exactly easy to migrate from the latest 1Password so I wrote my own little utility to do it[1].

I think we need more competition to VC backed products in general, just imagine what would happen if the building blocks of say a GNU/Linux system we take for granted today would've been built with the mindset that investors are going to want a return on their investment.

I am not saying there's anything wrong with that in principle, but am not sure I want to surrender my passwords to these kinds of incentives.

1 - https://github.com/MatejLach/1password-linux-to-bitwarden

This is exactly why I've switched from strongly recommending them, to strongly recommending against them. Plus their cloud security UX is horrendously confusing for everyone I've showed it to.

Whoever is driving their cloud push has probably made the most profitable business decision, but has absolutely no idea how to make a sane product.

Yeah I have been slowly trying to push away from 1pass as our corporate secrets overlord. 1pass is marketing towards business but screwing over their original community

Yeah I don’t know how to feel about this. I still have a license that allows me to use it with a local vault.

But I really want to get the family subscription. The Premium BitWarden plan is much cheaper than 1Password but the the Family plan doesn’t get you as much of a discount and my parents are on iPhones.

Edit: Dave Teare, the 1Password guy claims that when they were still offering standalone licences in 2018, people picked subscriptions over perpetual licences at more than a 30:1 ratio. Of course, they only showed the monthly price vs the perpetual price. But I’d hope people understand what subscription means.

Given how extremely hidden they've made the perpetual license option, I'm honestly surprised it's 30:1. That seems to be a sign of "people want this bad enough that they go hunting for it for quite a while".

No, they are picking subscriptions 30 times more than licenses.

When they first did this it wasn’t hidden at all. The website gave you 2 options side by side.

Are you sure? It looks like the license option was hidden almost immediately.

https://web.archive.org/web/20160915083507/https://1password...

It was hidden in both the website and the app almost immediately, yeah. Announced in/near August, and your link shows it in September: https://www.windowscentral.com/1password-launches-subscripti...

I remember noticing the announcement of subscriptions (possibly a couple weeks after it happened), being concerned it'd spell the end for dropbox sync so I checked it out ASAP, and then discovering my fears were mostly justified - it still existed (and remained around for a couple years), but it was shoved waaaay off into a corner. E.g. in the next subscription-oriented version of the apps, unless you attached a synced file FIRST, the option for dropbox syncing or standalone licenses was never available. The official instructions for fixing this were to reinstall the app from scratch and attach to the file first, before signing in.

Notice that only a few months later, the standalone license mention at the bottom of the page isn't even there any more: https://web.archive.org/web/20170215115945/https://1password...

Super hostile behavior, right out the gate. It was clear they were going all-in on subscriptions.

That's how I intended it, yeah. I'm surprised it's even over 1% of people choosing the standalone license.

does anyone know definitively which is the last 1password version that doesn't require cloud? some folks are saying it's v6 but i have 7.8.7, and everything seems to be working fine, as far as i can tell. i still use local vaults and dropbox syncing to my ios devices without issue.

Definitively: v7 works with stand-alone / non agilebits-synced databases; v8 will not. (I think v8 is out for Windows but not yet Mac.)

I am a long-time 1Password user who recently made the leap to their hosted service. 1Password remains best-in-class for me and has a terrific security record, especially compared to their peers. While I too lament the everything-is-a-subscription-now trend, I remain a strong supporter and avid fan of 1Password.

The latest integrations offered, for browsers and for e.g. Fastmail masked email address generation [1], only work with the cloud offering. I am happy to report that these latest offerings are fantastic and have tremendous UX.

[1]: https://www.fastmail.com/1password/

I would bet their Privacy.com integration is also v8/cloud only: https://blog.1password.com/privacy-virtual-cards/

It's not v8 at least, I use it on 7 just fine (though I do use the cloud offering). I don't see why it would be tied to that though considering it's just an API integration that saves the card into your 1password for the site you're on and then fills in the credentials. That _should_ theoretically work with a local vault as well on v7.

That same logic holds for the fastmail vanity email aliases, too, in that it's just an API integration; does your v7+cloud have that integration, too?

It does! I was actually considering switching to BitWarden right when the Fastmail integration came out and that's what kept me with 1Password.

The last time they offered stand-alone licenses was 1Password 7 in 2018. Not that long ago. But they seem to have made it harder and harder to get at the local vault settings.

Version 8 will only be subscription based.

so ixnay to version 8 then. are you for sure that there's no version 7 point upgrade that's broken like that?

my original license was 1password 3 (teams edition or something like that?) i believe, which i'd been upgrading all along. too bad they'll lose all this recurring revenue, even if it's not strictly as uniform and regular as subscriptions.

No I’m not. But version 7.8.7 is not that old.

Previously it was one license per user per platform. I’ve bought 1Password at least 3 times and pointed them to the same vault. Can’t remember if they had paid upgrades.

If you are not inclined to host your own server, it really doesn’t seem clear to me to migrate away. Only the single and 2 user free licence and the single premium license for bitwarden is a clear winner. For families it’s not much cheaper.

I’m not even opposed to paying. I’ve bought 1P a few times. And I’d pay for another service. I think it’s the fact that they are forcing the choice that gives me a bag taste in my mouth. But this is irrational if my 2nd choice is to pay bitwarden a similar amount of money for a family subscription.

How do iPhones factor in to this decision?

On iOS 1Password is definitely the most polished password manager. If I’m paying the family price, I’m not going to get a less good UI.

Long-term 1Password customer here, no affiliation with 1Password or AgileBits.

> They have been doing some pretty unfriendly moves towards their long-term customers

From my point of view this was not hostile at all: I used 1Password with Dropbox sync for years and absolutely loved it as a personal password manager _for myself_. But sharing of passwords with family was a real pain. I gleefully signed up for cloud-hosted 1Password Families at launch and haven't had a bit of regret. Of all the subscription services I use, at $4/mo 1Password is easily the best bang for the buck.

For sharing, it's just sooo much easer than trying to use Dropbox: I can invite family members just by entering their email address and 1Password walks them through the setup. I can create new vaults with the click of a button and easily select who I want to share them with. I can revoke access to members just as easily I don't have to have a Dropbox account and I don't have to wonder about whether I've set the right permissions on my vault files or whether my free Dropbox quota has been reached. I don't have to share _my_ vault keys and passwords with someone else to give them access to a vault. I can still export and back up an encrypted vault whenever and however I want.

It's no accident that all of these features are the same ones that make their product so attractive to businesses as well: ease of access and sharing are both essential for adoption by businesses.

One more note: I still have my old standalone licenses and can still go back to 1Password 4/6 with Dropbox sync any time I want and not pay another dime, as 1Password still has links to download the older versions on their website: https://1password.com/downloads/mac/

Long-term 1Password customer here as well. I understand you are willing to sacrifice security for convenience. I wouldn't mind the recurrent payment, I just cannot imagine to put both the app (which now is online) and the data in the same company hands. I couldn't live like that.

Same, I don't mind the recurring payment all that much - their apps are excellent. I used the subscription for the apps with a synced file for a couple years.

But the cloud push is absurd, and it got too aggressive for me to stomach. It means I no longer have local backups (this screwed over a friend, whose data was deleted by 1P immediately after changing account stuff and could not be recovered). Browsers are also unambiguously not well-suited for this kind of secure-environment use, as exploit after exploit demonstrates. It makes their website a huge bullseye for hacking, rather than needing to somehow attack their entire user-base independently. It's a profit-oriented decision that makes the product's security, its primary feature, worse.

> They have been doing some pretty unfriendly moves towards their long-term customers, like making sure the new 1Password cannot be used without 'the cloud' like the old one could be.

Despite disliking being forced into a subscription system, I gave it a go. Turns out I'm not smart enough to understand their cloud user interface. Was just so confusing.

I switched to Bitwarden.

> 1Password is quietly positioning itself to become the ground truth storage solution for corporate secret management

I think it is the exact opposite. They saw what Dashlane did with a few million bucks and some radio/TV ads and want to throw the same sort of gasoline on the fire. I expect they will have their own VPN, browser, credit monitoring, etc. tie in before they have real enterprise features.

They don't have FedRAMP, no HSM intergration, and it can't run in GovCloud. Not to mention it is super clunky to use compared to LastPass and others.

your opinion that it's more clunky than lastpass is really interesting to me. It runs completely counter to 99.9% of comments I've seen on HN.

Personally, I have no experience with lastpass. Just wanted to point out this anomaly.

FWIW, I have set up many, many non-technical users on an enterprise 1Password account. To those who haven't used a password manager there is a really big learning curve and I've seen tons of struggling.

I think a lot of it is the separate "vaults" concept can be easy to fuck up. I've had multiple instances where users have accidentally saved individual credentials in a shared vault because they didn't realize they weren't saving to their private vault.

Perhaps it's just the enterprise use cases that can confuse people, I'm guessing if you're just using it as 1 person with a single private vault there are fewer issues.

Lastpass incidents are so (in)famous, it’s on Wikipedia:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass

2011 2015 2016 2017 2019 2021

Those are just the famous ones. After 2014, their plugins and UX were so bad, I switched my team(s) to 1Password and never looked back.

This is the sentiment I've seen many times on HN.

Championing Lastpass, which is a fundamentally broken product in so so many aspects, kind of brings the rest of your comment into question.

It's still hard for me to fathom this valuation. For example, all the major clouds (AWS, GCP, Azure) have a Secrets Manager as simply one feature. I looked into 1Password secrets when they announced it but couldn't find any reason to use it over a cloud Secrets Manager.

For the same reason one might choose Hashicorp Vault versus the major cloud: cross-cloud, likely a richer feature set, almost certainly faster release cycles, and (for AWS specifically) no stupid "pay per request" billing to try and reason about. I'd guess it can make local development scenarios better, too

I think you are on the money here. I hadn’t spotted this but they have a k8s plugin for example:

https://github.com/1Password/onepassword-operator

This solves the “restart pods when my secret is updated” issue which suggests to me that they are not just paying lip service with these integrations.

They probably should merge with https://github.com/external-secrets/kubernetes-external-secr...

Well, Hashicorp stands on many legs and they don't have much competition in many areas as theirs solutions are pretty unique...

Their solutions are unique but the problems they are solving are not, they are in direct overlap with where 1P is going.

I've watched three different teams fail to get vault up and running in any kind of a sustainable way. If they could solve that problem and add a desktop client they could crush 1password in this space. Probably wouldn't hurt that tons of software engineers are absolutely pissed at their moves in the consumer space recently.

As a (paying) Hashicorp customer, my #1 problem is that there doesn't seem to be a lot of talent out there that actually knows how to use these tools and is deeply experienced in them.

And they are all critical pieces of infrastructure. I am very nervous to run a business critical site and store all its secrets in Vault, service discovery in Consul, and containers in Nomad (even though I really like all 3 and they've worked well so far) because we've had a couple of catastrophic cluster crashes where none of us had a clue how to recover without downtime and data loss. (Fortunately they happened in QA but it has delayed our production rollout of this infrastructure)

And I still don't have access to an "expert" – apart from one vendor who seems to know it inside out but is extremely expensive. So there isn't much of a choice.

So then there are two things I can do: become that expert and add that to our business offerings, or abandon the stack since it's too risky to be stuck with it. I don't want to make the mistake I made with Ember.js (nobody really knows it, it's beyond dead outside of a half dozen fortune 500 companies). I don't think that'll happen with Vault etc cuz they really are great products and ideas.

But it is a concern.

Hashicorp must know this, which is why they are betting big on HCP. I'd gladly pay for the uptime of these components to be their problem. And I am paying.

sleepybrett; which three are you talking about? and how?

Cue 1P - Hashicorp merger conversation

It's a leap people make. I wouldn't call it reasonable. There is no way Hashicorp generates 11 billion worth of value. The only reason they get so much cash is the big players are inflating value so they can gobble up as much cash as they can before the market comes to its senses and everything comes crashing down like in 2008.

To be honest, I've just started using that (just set up a brand-new infra, started to provision users and thought it's a good idea to hook it up to a good password manager) and I found their Secrets Automation is (IMHO) barely usable for now. One can create most basic records but that's about it. I realize they don't owe me anything, but - honestly - just from the notoriety of the brand I've had higher expectations.

I hope that's just because they don't have enough people and currently their efforts are stretched quite thin. $620M is huge amount of money, so hopefully they get new hires and would be able to deliver.

Enterprise stuff is slowly moving away from the use cases that require solutions like 1Password, and since they are neither FIPS 140-2 validated or have FedRAMP ATOs, they have alot of work to do.

They also have the issue of all of the crypto nerds going nuts when they start getting their FIPS stuff done.

Personally, I found SecretServer to be a better system of secrets management than 1Password, especially with regard to sharing and organizing secrets.

The "all or nothing folder" model that 1Password has has always been very frustrating to me.

Atm maybe, but since GCP/AWS provide their own solutions I don't really see 1P or Vault that much valuable - it's a pretty primitive solution with no lock-in or some hard-to-replicate technology.

I don't think anyone here is calling it a bad investment for the investors. We're calling it a bad event for the users.

>People thinking this is an absurd amount of money

Yea it is absurd compared to how much money Google and Facebook raised back in the day.

The money isn't worth nearly as much as it was then.

I like 1Password but I’d never trust them for corporate “secret” management.