So remember when 1Password claimed it was superior to LastPass for only requiring you to pay a one-time fee and not storing all of your stuff in the cloud?
Good times.
Good times.
I get that these moves make people nervous, and rightfully so. But as it stands every version of 1Password in active development (not including maintenance mode):
* Can be licensed standalone.
* Supports local & Dropbox vaults.
* Was released within the last year, actively supporting those features.
The only feature they’ve actually killed off (by not baking into future clients) is WLAN sync. This is a regression for some, but personally I always found it super impractical.
I agree that how they are going about this doesn’t inspire confidence that these features will remain in the product, but to some extent it does.
While they downplay the hell out of it, 1Password 6 for Windows was a ground up rewrite that ditched local vaults and standalone licensing. Those features were reintroduced in 1Password 7 for Windows, which is a pretty big backtrack for them and requires renewed development effort.
AgileBits doesn’t always make the right decision. They develop opinionated software, like most good developers. However, just like the MAS-only decision they made with 1Password 4 and stood by for some time, eventually they do right by their customers.
1Password 7 for Windows is a great example of that. As much as they would love to go cloud only, they heard the feedback and brought back those two key features. At this point, I can’t expect much more than that.
Not in my experience.
I moved to LastPass the moment Agile Bits decided to not support its (non subscription) 1Password paying customers in having a web access to the vault.
I had bought all 1Password versions + updates (Windows, Android, Mac, iOS) which put me well above $100. One day I simply couldn't use 1Password online, which I relied on for Chrome OS use. Dropbox decided, rightfully, that the public folder shouldn't be used as a static web server, which is what 1Password used as online vaults.
There was a long discussion in Agile Bits' forums about this issue. Agile Bits argued that it wasn't its responsibility to solve this since it was a Dropbox decision and its users could still store and sync the online vault manually on their own servers. I argued that losing automatic sync rendered the feature pretty much useless.
In any case, Agile Bits could have transitioned its users to the subscription model by either giving them subscription time or by offering an alternative to the Dropbox public folder, but it decided that its customers were not worth the effort.
I had a lot of respect for Agile Bits and 1Password, but this was a crappy way to treat its customers, specially considering 1Password was not a cheap product.
LastPass is not as elegant, but I'm happy with it.
This is incorrect. The command line client is subscription-only.
Ben Woodruff
AgileBits
Ben Woodruff
AgileBits
It’s still available for the Mac client, but they’ve essentially said they won’t be supporting it in the future.
1Password for Windows is a full rewrite and the new codebase never had WLAN sync. We wanted to see if people really need it when we announced 1Password 7 for Windows: https://blog.agilebits.com/2018/03/20/introducing-1password-...
I think so far we had about 90 people expressing interest in it. For a product with over 15 mln customers, that is a very low number.
I don't care about that feature... but this HN thread is the first I'd noticed that 1Password 7 for Windows actually exists and finally brings back local vault support. I care very much about that. I'd have liked to know about that the minute a public beta landed. But... I spend approximately 0 minutes a day thinking about ways I could better engage with AgileBits.
Maybe y'all could spare some minutes to figure out how to better engage with me, a customer who gave you some money 3+ years ago and has hardly heard a peep from you since.
1) We often don’t even have contact details for customers (e.x. App Store purchases) 2) When we do have such contact details they may have only been given for the purpose of completing a transaction, and did not agree to receive a newsletter or ongoing communications 3) Even when none of the above is a barrier it is very time intensive to send a newsletter. Not only does it require a fair bit of time to craft but the volume of inflows to our customer support team after sending a newsletter are huge.
I understand and agree with your position that putting the onus of keeping up on what is happening at AgileBits on the customer is no solution, but we do have to balance the above considerations. We’ll continue to look for ways we can do better.
Ben Woodruff
AgileBits
Blog and newsletter are the only options we have to communicate with our customers. I agree that it is not enough and not everyone receives this information.
If you have an idea how we can make it better, please let me know!