Hacker News Reader

Comment by jagger27 | Hacker News Reader

I thought AgileBits was pretty well respected around here. What dark patterns are you referring to?

I'm assuming he's referring to their beginnings of being a mostly local password manager (iirc they also had a one-off lifetime purchase), to forcing people to migrate to their cloud only infrastructure with a relatively high subscription price.

I'd never heard of 1Password before they were fully SaaS, but as I understand it, some of the original users were pretty upset with this move. Either way, I used to be a 1Password customer, and their product, at least on the Mac, was the most polished password manager.

What did you switch to if you stopped using 1Password?

Bitwarden. One of the big reasons for doing so was because when I left my company, they took my Mac away from me, so I invested in a new laptop, for me there was no way I was going for Windows or Mac. So Linux it is. 1Password at the time had extremely poor support for Linux - no desktop client, their 1PasswordX was missing a lot of features and was super slow too.

I switched to Bitwarden because it's open source, and because they have a good enough Linux client. Their browser extension and desktop client doesn't come close to what 1Password provided on Mac, but it does the job.

Bitwarden isn't without its issues, but at $10 a year, and its open source nature, it's worth every penny and then some.

Thanks for sharing. I’m sorry it took us so long to release a native Linux app. We have a great app for Linux now in beta and will move it to an official release shortly.

https://blog.1password.com/1password-for-linux-beta-is-now-o...

I hope you can give us another chance.

—Dave 1Password Founder

Thank you, I'm aware of the Linux client and it got me excited when it was announced, however since switching, OSS has become more and more important to me, so it's unlikely that I'll switch back.

You can self-host this unofficial version https://github.com/dani-garcia/bitwarden_rs if you prefer. maybe not worth $10/month of your time amortized to set up, but it has been fire-and-forget for me.

My kids have started accumulating more passwords than they can memorize (and their memorized passwords were terrible), so I wanted a family password manager. I considered using "1password for familes" which I have access to for free from my day job, but if/when I leave the company then I'll have to go back to paying for it. So far I greatly prefer the experience of bitwarden over 1password. I use the web vault, the native mac app, and the linux command line app (through a janky homegrown dmenu/xclip shell script), and I have no complaints at all.

It's exactly this - the original switch to SaaS was a high price to pay for basically what you already had if you had local sync/dropbox setup.

They finally fixed many of the objections with the "family" SaaS subscription and it just works and the price may be "low enough" that I don't bother figuring out a way out of it - but it is still pretty much the perfect example of "locked in".

What do you mean by locked in? When I think of locked in, I imagine it being hard to cancel and move to another service. I switched to 1Password last year from LastPass and the first thing I checked was the process for exporting my data. It seemed on par with LassPass, which was very simple, so I made the switch.

That's the locked in - they have all your passwords and (in theory) could make a change that makes it hard to extract.

Using the term ‘locked in’ to mean ‘some day something maybe might lock me in’ is a huuuuuuge stretch. To the point that I’d say you’re wrong.

Yes, this. I don't have any problem with paying for updates, or even really a subscription. I have a problem with their hard push to "use our cloud", burying the abilities to not immediately create a cloud account, and the way they respond to customers in their forums when they ask about non-cloud options.

Ref: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20417832

I used 1Password for a long time. When they shifted to the SaaS model I left angrily. Over time I tried out several other programs such as Enpass (came close to the original 1pw), keepass varieties, Bitwarden but found myself back at 1Password this year. One big thing, which funny enough is another dark pattern I guess, is the family account feature. I allows me to take family members on and we can share certain passwords and I think even help recover an account. This is also important because 1PW is the most easy to use password manager and my mom was really struggling with Enpass.

A new feature that adds value is not a 'dark pattern'. Lets not be dramatic.

Even moving from one-time to subscription isn't a 'dark pattern', its a business model move to shift to recurring revenue, which we know is something that businesses need to keep the lights on. You can debate the merits of it, but it's not a dark pattern in and of itself. HOW they execute that might be, but the change itself isn't. You just have a personal preference to not want to pay for it in a particular way.

> A new feature that adds value is not a 'dark pattern'. Lets not be dramatic.

Family plans are in my eyes. They log users more into the platform and makes it very difficult to switch. If you want to move away from Spotify, you now have to convince enough of the others to make it feasible.

> Even moving from one-time to subscription isn't a 'dark pattern'

I did not claim that it was one. I also was not even mad about recurring payments, to me the problematic change was that the data was now hosted on some other machine owned by the company who is producing the software (e.g. in theory single point of entry).

I'm trying to charitably understand what you're advocating for but it sounds like you're arguing that getting multiple people to use any app is criteria for dark pattern because once they do start using that app, to switch you have to convince them as a group. So.. should everyone use different apps? Or is a protocol the solution?

As far as where data is stored, which sounds a bit like a different argument, I guess what you're advocating for is some kind of peer-to-peer sync solution across family member devices that would work anywhere. That's cool but I think it may a lot of technical complexity vs a cloud solution, and it still doesn't change the fact that you still have the issue above about switching as a group.

It might be worth reviewing what dark pattern actually means - UI tricks to get people to do things they don't want to do. If people like a product enough that they convince others to use it as well, that's ... a good product? I get the data storage concern though.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_pattern

I think you are interpreting too much into my side comment of “its a dark pattern I guess”. Hereby I retract this part of my statement.

Ah fair enough, I was probably being extra HN nitpicky myself. Cheers

>to forcing people to migrate to their cloud only infrastructure ... fully SaaS

A slight gentle correction. I criticize them elsewhere in this thread, but in fairness I have to point out that this isn't quite correct yet. It's still possible (though they've buried it) to buy a standalone perpetual license for the latest 1Password, run purely local vaults, or keep syncing via Dropbox, iCloud, or manually over WLAN. There isn't any hard tie to the 1Password.com service yet.

Perhaps they'll put the kibosh on that in the future. And they can be and I will criticize them for not having better local sync options, which they clearly stopped bothering with in favor of their own cloud offering. But for the time being I've still got a fully local 1Password 7 license that works the same as every previous version.

Well, until they intentionally break something like the 1password4 integration with the browser extention. And after asking why it broke they say: sorry you're out of luck but here is a shining new subscription just for you.

Now you're forced to buy the new version just for the integration that has always worked fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com