[Eva_Schweber]

Full disclosure, I work for AgileBits, the folks that make 1Password.

I hear and appreciate your collective concerns that we are getting rid of the standalone license option. However, I'd like to assure you that not only are there no plans to get rid of it, we are continuing to develop the standalone version. We know that we have a critical mass of customers who appreciate the ability to store their password data outside of the cloud. And given that we are entirely customer funded, those are customers that we cannot and are not ignoring.

Our subscriptions options remain new and we are still figuring a lot of things out. One of the ongoing issues has been customer confusion between licenses and account. That is why we have made it a bit harder to locate information about licenses on our site. Nothing insidious, just an attempt to make it easier for the majority of our customers to locate what they are looking for without confusing them.

If anyone has any additional questions or concerns, I would encourage you to contact us directly at [e-mail].

Best, Eva

[bad_user]

I think this is disingenuous because only a month ago Kyle from AgileBits was saying that you are considering getting rid of the standalone option, if customers vote with their wallet and I quote:

> "we don't have any immediate plans to remove the standalone products. However, if a vast majority of our users switch to 1Password Family or 1Password Teams (and as of today, an Individual plan!) then it doesn't make a ton of sense to keep the standalone product around. So, it's probably one of those speak with your wallet kind of scenarios."

Source: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12173892

You also got rid of the Mac-only licensing option after introducing 1Password for Families. Unless I don't remember correctly, it was about $20 cheaper than the option that also gives you that old and unmaintained Windows client.

I mean, if it's a contest between the standalone version and subscriptions, it sure looks like the game isn't fair.

[dilap]

Hey, I'm a happy 1pass customer, but give me fucking break.

Maybe 1 visitor in 100, visiting your website, would even realize that there's a fixed-price option still available. It's buried way at the bottom of the pricing page, hidden inside the FAQ.

The link itself just leads to a purchase page, with absolutely no attempt to explain or lay out the differences between the subscription and fixed price option.

To claim this about "preventing customer confusion" seems to me pretty absurd. Be more honest, please.

[jsmthrowaway]

I think the explanation is reasonable even if you disagree with it, and the world isn't a polarity between "company behaviors I agree with" and "shady, insidious, underhanded behavior by a company that deserves basically openly harassing someone who volunteered to talk about it and questioning their integrity and honesty in a comment." People are too quick to accuse someone of dishonesty these days and I don't think most realize how serious of a charge that actually is. If you said something like that to me in person we'd have a serious problem because at the end if the day, integrity is all anybody really has.

Anyway, completely happy subscription user here and it's actually the reason I went back to 1Password. I used to do the standalone Dropbox thing too and the subscription is just night and day better, and given the value I extract from this product I'm not going to freak out over half a coffee a month nor accuse AgileBits, a company I've tremendously respected for many years with their attention to support and customer experience, with suddenly being the axis of evil as you've done here.

I'll drive this point home: I actually got the standalone licenses cheaper through work way back when and still happily entered into paying for a subscription from my own funds.

I think the people extremely upset about this, including you, are the ones being disingenuous and forgetting how reasonable AgileBits is in everything else they do. I'm not even a fan, it's just been apparent to me for a long time.

Again, this is $36 per year. How much value do you extract from the stuff you store in 1Password? Is it really that unreasonable for a company to move toward more recurring revenue? It's a really weird opinion here, of all places, the "let's build a hypergrowth SaaS" home of the Web.

[dilap]

I'm not accusing them of being evil, or even commenting on the change to a subscription model -- I'm just calling out what to me looks like transparent dishonesty.

[ketralnis]

I'm a customer that has purchased on multiple platforms, paid for upgrades, and recommended 1password to people in person and on social media. I don't ever want to sync my secrets to the cloud. Ever. A subscription model will permanently lose me as a customer.

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

It's really hard to believe you aren't moving to a 100% subscription model, especially when the "standard license" is now effectively getting the legacy treatment on your product page. It doesn't feel like another version of your product, it feels like the one that is about to be dead.

[guiambros]

I have no problem with your intention to move users towards annual subscriptions, nor offering cloud storage as an optional feature. This would certainly be more convenient for newbies.

I also have no problem in paying you $36 per year for the same functionality that I have today with the downloadable version. I guess between the family version, plus iOS, plus upgrades, I've been paying the same amount every couple of years.

But the moment you start forcing users to use your cloud storage (instead of locally managed options, like ssh, local sync, etc), you lost me forever.

Please make sure you keep these options very separate. Give security conscious users the option to not have their computers "phoning home" to your servers, and to explicitly enable cloud sync only if they want.

[eeeeeeeeeeeee]

I like the separation between services right now. 1Password manages the client, Dropbox handles the storage, because they're experts at that. The same is true for Arq, a popular Mac backup software. Arq handles the client interactions but uses third party storage providers to store the data. I trust Amazon to store my backups.

Granted, backups are not the same as passwords, but they are both important to maintain in terms of data integrity and security. And I wouldn't trust Arq to run their own cloud storage platform and I don't trust 1Password to operate their own cloud password storage solution, either.

[manyxcxi]

I have two standalone accounts (wife and I) and I use the Team subscription for my, well, team. The thing is, I've chosen 1Password for my personal secrets because I don't share them with anyone, ever. I don't need them stored centrally as long as there is the Dropbox option, and I feel like it is precisely this architecture that has kept 1Password mostly out of the headlines unlike some of their competitors.

[saddestcatever]

Hey Eva, can you pass some notes onto the team for me?

- OSX Desktop app is great. The "[+]" button to add new logins is in an odd location, but no big deal.

- The Android app needs a "Most Recent" view. I end up searching for the same logins, until I remember they can be favorited.

- When I re-install the Android App, it always prompts me to buy the PRO version. Takes a bit to resolve that it's already been purchased.

- Windows app is bad. Really bad. Recommended 1Password to a few friends, and had to later apologize when I realized they weren't in the Mac ecosystem. Slow, janky. Has a bad habit of locking up chrome when I first open the plugin.

- Lastly - yet another subscription service? I want you to be successful, but I likely won't be recommending 1Password anymore, or dropping if the standalone license gets feature locked.

[Esau]

I think you need to adjust the pricing page graphics to reflect there are three purchase options, not just two subscription options. Many people, myself included, will not use subscriptionware.

[cjcampbell]

As a long time user across platforms who has continued to pay for upgrades and has now licensed a Team and Family. I appreciate the direction you are heading, and I was more than willing to pay a recurring fee given how much the pace of development has picked up.

Since 1Password hasn't had much support for teams and password sharing (e.g., for super admin or disaster scenarios), I have continued to support multiple managers across my clients. Due to their robust support for teams, Dashlane and Lastpass have been the most deployed. While these solutions are simple enough that my clients can make them work, they don't enjoy using them. Quite often, I've learned that they've hit enough obstacles that they don't even trust the tool and keep reusing the same weak passwords all over the web so that they can remember what they need.

I'm rushing to move these same clients over to 1Password before the Teams promo ends. The attention to detail and subtle improvements to UX have been really well received. And today, I will be meeting with a non-profit board to convince them to get on board.

I will take the opportunity to push a few requests (that I know you've heard before ... from me):

1) Many of my clients are required (by law) to provide access to their business records in case of their death. It'd be nice to give my family and employees access to certain accounts as well. Guest vaults with auditing are a step in the right direction, but I'd love to see time delayed access. I have an opportunity to reject access within a certain time frame (configurable). My concern here is that I don't want to rely on the security practices of the people I'm sharing with to protect these particular passwords.

2) Pairwise sharing with teammates and guests. I often need to share a single password/key (not a vault) in a pairwise fashion with several different people. Vaults are too much for one-off sharing, and the guest limits are pretty restrictive here.

3) Revised guest model. I believe Team accounts are capped at 20 guests and Families at 2. Why not cap the number of items in a guest vault (10-15 seems fair) instead? I'm assuming the restriction is there to prevent people from abusing the feature (totally understandable). But there are some valuable guest use cases for power users (and even everyday family users).

I want to set up a vault for my housemates and another for the folks who sublet the extra offices in my lease. 1Password is the perfect place for me to store information about door codes, wireless networks, and a few other sensitive details that may be important if I'm not available. This could also get me off of LastPass/Dashlane completely for managing project-related passwords with clients.

4) Along the same lines, the Pro pricing for Team seems really high. I do need some of the functionality, but I can't imagine paying approx $150/user/year to get it (though maybe a $150/team/year to upgrade the feature set would feel reasonable even for my small team). I also know that I'll never be able to sell my smaller healthcare providers on it, even though the extra functionality would be valuable for compliance.

5) Referral/partnership arrangement. I am constantly onboarding clients onto password management solutions, and handling many of their day-to-day challenges. I'm not just thinking about financial incentives here. It'd be nice to have some partner oriented features in the application, like the ability to move a guest vault out to an independent team or audit-only access.