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Comment by broth | Hacker News Reader

What’s wrong with subscriptions?

Subscriptions lock you in on various levels. It’s very similar to renting a house. You can get kicked out by the owner.

Subscriptions for individuals is different from subscriptions for companies. Companies want to optimise time, individuals may want to optimise cost

personally, I am inclined to pay for IDEs as I spend more than 50% of the time on it, but not so much similar amounts when I use tools no more than 5-10 times a day.

Agreed. I liked 1Password a lot more when it was not subscription-based. The client is worse, the reliability is worse, the subscription is painful. The value is not there.

But it's a password manager and I use it. Perhaps I will bother to investigate alternatives and switch before my next renewal.

I think they should continue to allow users to buy a license and use your own sync as they did before. I had no problem paying for a license each time a major version was release.

Honestly, I don’t feel like most here are really the majority of their target audience.

I’ll continue using it though. I haven’t found anything that works as well for me.

You buy a product to use it. Continuing to have to pay for something that already exists on my computer and doesn't require anything from them is just extortion. Subscriptions are for when you are buying a service. There is no service I am buying when using 1Password (previously).

Do you expect regular updates? Security patches (including for zero-days)? Sync across all your devices? Backup and restore? 2FA? All of this requires dedicated ongoing work from the service side, and they are giving it to you for literally $3/month.

Security updates yes, but passwords are one of the most stable, least changing-parts of anything I do with a computer. File sync is also well understood and a commodity offering. In 35 years, the only thing that’s changed for me viz logging in is the introduction of TOTPs. I’d rather not have my password manager constantly changing except for security updates. I certainly don’t want to pay a a subscription service for a company to reshuffle the UI every five years.

I’ve switched to KeePassXC and Strongbox on iOS. It’s every bit as good as 1Password was for the last ten years, and I don’t have to worry about the future of the product locking me into crappy “growth” decisions. I’ll be donating a similar subscription fee to the maintainers of KeePassXC that 1Password would ask for.

I would gladly pay the $3/month if they were doing what you mentioned in addition to adding features. One of the problems with their new subscription model is that they're replacing existing support for password syncing with a forced adoption of syncing to their cloud. Syncing to Dropbox (or others) is going to be removed with 1Password 8 and we'll be forced to either keep the old license of 1P7 and lose out on security updates, or, to start paying a subscription and accept that they manage the syncing instead. For many that's not acceptable, and it's a bit of a slap in the face for all the supporters they've had for years now who have been promoting their product through word of mouth.

And you can still use that product (1Password 7/6, including continued iOS app support you're not paying for), but the subscription is a service that people other than you do pay for. They just released 1Password for SSH Keys and it works pretty well, that's the type of updates I expect from my continued payment for a password management service.

Bitwarden has subscriptions as well, however it is open source.

If you compare the price of Bitwarden to other proprietary Password Managers it is next to nothing. If you don't even want to pay for that take a look at VaultWarden

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