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Comment by preek | Hacker News Reader

Good timing that I moved all my passwords from 1Password to Emacs and GPG one year ago. It’s a pity; I’ve been a very happy customer for a long time, had licenses for multiple machines and was happy enough to pay for the updates.

But my data shall be my data, again. I’m not paying for an app that I regularly have to buy an upgrade for and which doesn’t give me the opportunity to hold my data locally after explicitly having this as a selling proposition for many years.

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People keep bringing this up, and it feels like a major failure of Agilebits marketing approach.

The subscription service changes the frequency at which you pay Agilebits; it does not mandate how you store your data. 1Password 7 continues to allow all the kinds of local/Dropbox/etc vaults that prior versions allowed.

If somebody at Agilebits is reading this thread: look around at these comments. The lack of clear information about local storage in the subscription model is causing massive levels of customer concern.

I think it is likely that they want to hide this option, as they have hidden the standalone version. I think their long-term plan is to have everyone on their subscription with data stored in the 1Password cloud.

This reduces support and development load (no need to support local/Dropbox/Wifi sync with all its edge cases) and guarantees montly/yearly payments.

I think they’ve actually been quite upfront about the option, even if it’s not front and center on the website right now.

Both the standalone subscription and the local vault support have regularly been mentioned in announcements and updates for 1Password 7 from the start. My impression is that agilebits understands how important these options are to their users and have invested in keeping them around for the long-term.

The support and development load is indeed much higher when it comes to standalone vaults. There is an infinite number of scenarios out of our control when it comes to Dropbox and WLAN sync. Several times in the past we had support inbox at over 10,000 emails waiting for response.

If AgileBits was VC-funded then we would have to drop standalone vaults, no doubt. It is a good thing that we are not. We do care about our long-time customers and will provide standalone vaults for as long as there is demand for them. Just please do not ask us to make it a default option.

The local storage model is only really desirable for the more paranoid subset of software/IT folk, and those people have a lot more options than just 1password because they're technically savvy enough to work with open source solutions. Their actual target market is drastically larger than that subset of users.

I understand where you are coming from and we thought about advertising this feature.

However, it would not be the best option for most of the customers. They would have to understand how to take care of local vaults, including syncing, backups, etc. It is really an advanced feature for very technical audience.

My concern isn't that you aren't advertising the feature, it's that your marketing speaks in many cases directly contrary to your real feature-set. Taking an example already quoted elsewhere in this thread:

> 1Password 7 from the Mac App Store will only support our hosted service, as that’s what you’re purchasing with a 1Password membership. If you install from our website, you’ll have to option to use a standalone vault synced via iCloud if you purchase a standalone license, or use our hosted service if you purchase a 1Password membership.

> As it stands, though, how you purchase 1Password is intrinsically tied to where you store your vaults and how you sync them

This was directly in response to a question about the ability to continue using local vaults in 1Password 7, and it doesn't say that local vaults are an advanced feature, it says they will not be supported by people who buy a subscription.

If y'all just didn't mention the local vaults in most of the marketing, and then there was an "Advanced users only" section that said "however you pay us, you'll be able to keep using local vaults just like always", you'd solve a whole broad spectrum of the concerns you're seeing on this page.

This quote was posted in response to a question about the Mac App Store and is taken out of context here. We’d strongly encourage anyone looking to subscribe but use standalone vaults to do so through our website, rather than the Mac App Store. I can’t guarantee that’ll be a viable setup through the Mac App Store. When done through our website though it definitely is. It isn’t the recommended path (as you are paying for features you won’t be able to use), but it is possible.

I’m sorry for any confusion caused by the comment. Hopefully this clarifies.

Ben Woodruff

AgileBits

They're still selling standalone versions for MacOS & Windows that run off local storage. Doesn't seem like they're doing multi-OS license bundles anymore, though, so it's gonna run expensive if you use more than one OS.

This is accurate. In general / on average standalone vaults require more support, and the price of licensing compared to subscription pricing reflects that.

Ben Woodruff

AgileBits

Could you comment on your emacs setup? I see a few threads on this from Google, but just curious what your setup is and maybe some tidbits about the pros and cons of this kind of setup. Thanks in advance.

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