I love 1Password but the subscription-only path doesn't sit well with me. They're intentionally removing key features so they can justify providing a service that I can do myself.
I'm increasingly sick of good standalone software suddenly moving to this model. They are a business, I get it.
However how many subscriptions are we going to have to end up with?
I get it with Slack, Dropbox, Github, etc as they all started with infrastructure to run. But 1Password (and Adobe and others) are pushing profits far far above their users. It's a shame.
> The overwhelming majority of people (97% in fact) choose to subscribe to our new service and many of those who initially purchased a license later changed their mind and traded it in for a membership.
With each of the last two versions, they hid the standalone version more. I'd hardly characterize all 97% of those users as voluntary.
Adding to this, they've also left showstopping sync bugs in the standalone version, and the customer support team uses this as a reason to push people to switch to the subscription service.
They were also giving away subscriptions for free for quite a while to get people to move.
> Adding to this, they've also left showstopping sync bugs in the standalone version, and the customer support team uses this as a reason to push people to switch to the subscription service.
Woah, really? Would you mind linking some threads for the benefit of everyone else skimming through this?
(I'm still on 1Password 6, and the experience is mostly smooth-sailing except for browser extensions.)
This comes from personal experience with support. For example, I experienced a bug for 6+ months where Wi-Fi syncing stopped working, and customer service said "This is a bug, but we're probably not going to fix this any time soon. Here's a free credit to upgrade to the subscription service."
I can't link to that interaction in particular, because it was over email, but you can see some of this behavior in their public forums:
- A more benign (but still important) syncing bug, where the team indicated it wasn't a priority to fix. Even though they say the bug is 'visual', it shows a lack of commitment to maintaining sync as a core feature [0]
- A public example of the sort of "bug to upsell" experience I had with support [1]
[0] is a lengthy support forum discussion discussing many points on whether WLAN sync is a worthwhile feature, even though it’s a thread specific to Windows.
[1] shows the level of support you’ll receive for the feature. They will not actively investigate issues or release fixes, AFAICT. I’ve had my own issues with it.
If you link through to the troubleshooting doc [2] from that page, you’ll see this message:
> We’re unable to troubleshoot issues with the WLAN server beyond the scope of this article. If you’ve tried everything in the article and are still unable to connect, a 1Password membership is a more reliable sync method.
I, too, took the 1PW membership route years ago for exactly this reason.
I think it depends on how they got 97%. They hide the standard version on the website, but the specific picture they show in-app[0] is pretty clear about the license option, so if it's 97% of people choosing the subscription via that screen i'd believe them.
I agree with these sentiments. I love 1Password and pay for a subscription. But this post is simply trying to gussy up their subscription-only move for maximizing MRR. Call it what it is - don't lie about it by saying you're only doing it because "everyone loves our monthly subscription service".
You can at least cycle through streaming services, dropping them when there's less content of interest and then re-adding when it has accumulated. It's much more difficult to do that with your password manager.
And you can cancel and subscribe at a moments notice, unlike cable contracts and having to use cable boxes and equipment rental fees. And you can watch whenever, wherever you want.
Sounds like a great improvement to me. You also do not have to pay for 2 to 5 streaming services. You can choose 1, or 2, or however many you want.
> You can choose 1, or 2, or however many you want.
That way you could also "choose" not to pay for cable. But the reality is that if you want to watch all the latest popular shows and movies you have to pay for 4-5 streaming services.
Even if pick-and-choose subscriptions weren't cheaper than cable (which they are, for me so far at least), I'd gladly pay up to 2x the cost of Comcast service just to avoid subsidizing Comcast's evil monopoly, and how Comcast is intentionally keeping much of the US from having real, modern internet service (read: fiber with symmetric speeds, instead of their bullshit where they pretend a 1000Mbps down/20Mbps up link is lightning-fast and don't even TELL customers what the upstream speed is).
I'm increasingly sick of good standalone software suddenly moving to this model. They are a business, I get it.
However how many subscriptions are we going to have to end up with?
I get it with Slack, Dropbox, Github, etc as they all started with infrastructure to run. But 1Password (and Adobe and others) are pushing profits far far above their users. It's a shame.