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.
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.
When they first did this it wasn’t hidden at all. The website gave you 2 options side by side.
https://web.archive.org/web/20160915083507/https://1password...
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.
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.
Version 8 will only be subscription based.
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.
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.
> 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/
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.
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.
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