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Comment by bwoodruff | Hacker News Reader

We continue to sell licenses for each 1Password 7 for Mac and 1Password 7 for Windows. These licenses are available within the app when downloaded from our website. We would strongly recommend 1Password membership as that is going to provide the best experience, but if you’d prefer a license for one or both of those products they are for sale. We recommend memberships as they address a number of requests our customers had that we were unable to accommodate without connecting to a server to perform the heavy lifting, such as 2FA, sharing, etc. It also significantly simplifies the purchasing experience: a subscription includes access to the latest versions of all the 1Password apps. You can read more here: https://support.1password.com/explore/membership/ - Ben, 1Password

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As a standalone license customer for almost 10 years now, the constant responses like this and the deliberate non-answers on the forums really make me wonder how long I will continue to use 1password. I love 1password but I will not put my passwords in someone else's cloud.

It's honestly pretty insulting that every time this comes up, someone from 1password pops in to talk down to your customers and push subscriptions.

I understand the business reasons of why you want subscription revenue, but pretending that you're pushing subscriptions for the good of your customer is just so transparently false. It's good for your bottom line, just own it.

Indeed. Stuff like this:

> We would strongly recommend 1Password membership as that is going to provide the best experience

is maddening. Do you guys really think we all just don't know what is going to provide the best experience? Because what will provide me the best experience is keeping it simple, not taking on an online dependency, and keep putting out standalone updates and platform ports, which I'd gladly pay for.

The condescension, evasiveness and dishonesty is just sad.

I'm sorry it comes off that way. We don't mean any disrespect in the slightest. Your support over all these years means the world to us and we know darn well we wouldn't be here today without awesome customers like you. <3

I left a comment just above yours that I invite you to read. I don't want to repeat it in its entirety here but suffice it to say we're excited about our hosted solution and yes we can find ourselves shouting from the rooftops about it. Kinda like newlyweds I suppose. :)

++dave; 1Password Founder

Ok, so go back through your forums and threads like these and read all the "how do I get standalone" questions throughout the last 5-6 years and tell me honestly that the awkward non-answers are just you guys being excited about your hosted solution. It's evasive. I'd feel a lot more mutual respect if you'd drop the charade and just say "yeah, you guys aren't really our primary use case anymore and we're not really planning to support you. Sorry." Making us read between the lines while you play coy games like saying "well, it's not advertised, but it kinda works on some platforms" is insulting.

I can certainly understand and appreciate your point of view. You are free to disagree with mine and I am sorry that it might come off the condescending, it is certainly not what any of us want to convey.

However, we are also 1Password users and we build the product for ourselves. We are supporting millions of customers, several thousand support emails and tickets every day. And I am honest, the membership provides much better experience compared to standalone disjoined apps, manual syncing and lack of account recovery. The list of differences and improvements is huge. It certainly makes me sad when people think that it is only about sync.

Roustem, Founder of 1Password

My honest advice is to just make a clear statement that you're dropping standalone mode and do it. People with licenses can continue using their non-upgradeable versions as long as they want but they're not getting any more updates. That would be a lot less dishonest than pretending it's supported-ish and just hiding it deeper and deeper on every release.

We still support our customers using 1Password 3 (originally released in 2009).

You are probably right though. We should be more clear on where the future development of the product and service is going.

Thank you for supporting us all these years! We wouldn't be here without awesome customers like you. <3

As a long time user I bet you remember when we needed to write posts like Two Factor or not Two Factor[1].

> One and a Half Factors?

Good times. :) Thankfully with our own service we are now able to provide real 2FA as our server is able to enforce it. Same with family sharing, team environments, automated backups, item history, account recovery that only your family organizers/team admins can perform, along with simple invites and easier device setup.

And it's not just new features but we can make existing ones better. You probably have seen your fair share of Conflict Resolution windows and weird sync issues over the last 10 years. Sync is a hard thing to get right and being able to rely on a server to give specific responses in specific situations has enabled us to provide a much better experience than we ever could with a generic file service.

The reality is 1Password is better than it ever has been as a direct result of allowing our developers to work their magic on both sides of the network connections. Server and client.

It's a bit dated now but I wrote From a Happy 1Password Maker[2] back in 2017 that highlights a lot of things we love about memberships. In it I explain why I'll continue to non-apologetically nudge everyone towards 1Password Memberships.

[1]: https://blog.1password.com/two-factor-or-not-two-factor/ [2]: https://blog.1password.com/why-we-love-1password-memberships...

++dave; 1Password Founder

For what it's worth, not a single one of those entries in the "no more" list appeals to me in any way. I've never complained that I lost my master password, or that the license didn't work on multiple platforms, or that I accidentally deleted my files. I don't feel the need for 2FA because -- and this is a big deal to me -- my password database isn't online. I know how to do backups. It's simple and self-contained. I can use it at work where policy prohibits online password management. I don't have to worry that I'm getting continuous "new features" updates that are going to change my working environment outside of my control (I can still roll back to v6.0 if I want). I don't like external dependencies. This is a much, much greater concern to me than the "niceties" you mention that literally bring me no value. So please, stop acting like you know better than your users. You may have the 90% case nailed but you're just pissing the rest of us off with your attitude.

> I don't feel the need for 2FA because

The problem here is how many services have been moving to forced 2FA lately (presumably because their users keep getting their re-used passwords leaked).

I'd move to 1Password (from KeePass) just to deal with these obnoxious 2FA requirements - except many of them, adding insult to injury, are SMS-only. (Feature idea for 1Password? Assign me a phone number that will automatically consume SMS 2FA codes and type them into browsers for me?)

Oh, I regularly use 2FA on individual sites. I just don't see the point of using 2FA to access passwords for sites which, if important, have 2FA enabled themselves. 4FA?

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