Just because there was shady shit back then doesn't mean it wasn't, in some ways, a better system.
Adobe gating new camera RAW formats behind paying for an upgrade was a real problem. You buy the latest Nikon DSLR and Adobe makes you buy PS CS5 for literally no reason other than that.
But bugfixes was a real problem. So a colleague of mine had an old iPhone or iPod Touch. I forget which. He used it for testing. He kept it on iOS 7 (this was years ago) because later upgrades just slowed the phone down. This ultimately became a problem when heartbleed [1] came out. Of course, Apple pushed a fix but that fix required upgrading iOS. If you didn't want to upgrade iOS or couldn't because your device wasn't supported, well you were SOL.
So this isn't exactly the same as paid software but you can in some ways view the phone as buying hardware and the software. And there defeinitely have been cases where bugfixes (including serious vulnerabilities) were only fixed on later versions.
When upgrades are paid, people stick to old versions. This can be bad for everyone. There's an awful lot of botnets, for example, that rely on old versions of Windows and other software that's never upgraded. I suspect this is why Microsoft abandoned paid Windows upgrades because it ultimately hurt them and it was untenable to fix every bug in every version of Windows.
Nowadays it's $2.99 a month. If you cancel or miss a payment they lock you out of all your passwords at the end of the current billing period.
Whenever your subscription lapses your 1Password account will instead go into a "frozen" state. While your account is frozen, you can still view, use, and even export all your items, copy your passwords, and even copy items to vaults outside your account.
The only things you won't be able to do while an account is frozen is add new items to vaults, edit existing items, invite people to your family or team, or autofill items in your browser.