Seems like a lot of people are missing the piece as to probably why they need the money (and where they're pointing the company in the future). Future of 1Password: https://www.future.1password.com/
I don't know much about much, but I do know that the far future of computing isn't going to involve people memorizing and typing complicated passwords, or using finicky password managers. There is massive potential for growth and vision in this space.
I say this as a 1Password subscriber and user of its products going back all the way to 1Password 3.
On the contrary, many of us are already experiencing the paid SaaS squeeze from 1Password long before this fundraising.
It doesn’t matter what they claim to need the money for. The company and product already declined from a great standalone option to a forced SaaS subscription payment with the self-hosted options removed. There’s no way I’m buying the story that they’re raising more money without a goal of squeezing more money from their customers, nor will I believe that they’re only going to get this profit from other customers while ignoring the consumer space.
In the real world, companies don’t actually segment up their product offerings and operate them as separate businesses with separate profitability goals. It’s all one big product mix and they’ll be squeezing money out of everything, wherever they can find it.
1: 1Password already backhanded users once for business reasons. They used to be a nice, local password manager that synced with dropbox or your choice of filesystem. Then they added cloud support and used dark patterns to force adoption of a subscription based cloud service while making the local version harder and harder to use. At some point I gave up, I’m not even sure it’s possible to use locally anymore. It might be that the marginal utility is worth it, but forcing my hand also broke my trust
2: This is now the path of the majority of American corporations, most especially high growth vc funded; make something awesome, grow, extract profits, die. It doesn’t really matter whether it’s burritos or password managers, we’ve seen this pattern one too many times.
The brand damage has been done regardless.
Nitpicking but 1P is a Canadian company :) . I guess the pattern is almost universal?
They want to become something like a Passport for users across the web.
If they can do this, it will be huge. But hopefully I'm not alone in hating this direction and see tracking individual identities as a small price to pay to protect freedoms.