(Also I didn't mean thousands of free services, I meant that each one will give you thousands of megabytes for free. Honestly just google and microsoft accounts, and icloud with a device, cover just about everyone. But there are a lot of free storage services if you want them.)
The program itself might not get information efficiently to do conflict resolution (or not at all): for example, you edit a file offline and sync, Dropbox and friends wouldn't be smart enough to just append both of a few bytes worth of data that a password-manager controlled service could since it would be aware of the data structure but would just dump both files, and then both on another conflict etc
So I guess it's just not the same type of sync service that you get for free in those many services
(also I think it's more than a sub-Mb, you have icons there, but also images of docs and what not)
Though maybe this is not an issue as you mention some of the keepass-based apps that go the "app-sync" route instead of manually placed file?
Right, my main concern here is programs that talk directly to the service's API, because that's the easiest to implement in a correct way. Dumb file storage, but without the worry of stale versions appearing.
Though most people don't need their vault to be robust against simultaneous offline edits from multiple devices.
> (also I think it's more than a sub-Mb, you have icons there, but also images of docs and what not)
I have usernames/urls/passwords, some notes, some icons, and some ssh and bitlocker key files. In total it's 159KB, including a bunch of version history and the recycle bin.
What kind of documents would I put in a password file?
Though some extra megabytes don't really affect my argument much.
This is one of those very rare cases with potentially huge negative effect to make it into a mandatory feature.
> Dumb file storage
Which still suffers from inefficient incremental updates. Curious whether those other managers deal with that (do they split your vault into parts)?
> What kind of documents would I put in a password file?
Whatever documents you want to securely share with others, various scanned docs, so it's not just a few megs, (e.g., Bitwarden offers up to 1G encrypted file attachments) (though don't use this either, mine is just a few megs)
The only thing you would need to make mandatory is a direct login to any storage service.
> Which still suffers from inefficient incremental updates. Curious whether those other managers deal with that (do they split your vault into parts)?
If it's a megabyte, who cares? You could have a way to split things or upload an update log, but it's not worth it.
If you need big attachments, then keep them outside the core vault file.
> Whatever documents you want to securely share with others
Sharing is where a dedicated service is useful.
But if a feature like that needs a paid service, it should be an optional upgrade.
In particular, the reason it's annoying to sync keepass is because of how the program is designed. There are other managers in that ecosystem that let you log in to google/microsoft/dropbox/anything and then you're done. It all syncs perfectly from then on. It's a development problem, not a need for a dedicated service tied to a specific password manager.
And when I'm considering development cost I'm going to look at things on a 5 or 10 year timeline. I think that's a reasonable length to expect a software purchase to last. On that timescale, Bitwarden is okay but 1Password is not at all a good price.