[9x39]

Serious question - how come free is a requirement for a password manager? Everyone's gotta eat, including the maintainers of password managers.

Tech has generous TC, lots of high-end laptops and phones worth thousands, AI & cloud spend, and yet the only acceptable price for secrets management is $0 it seems at times.

[culi]

They promised an "always free" option. People committed to the service based on that.

Many companies offer a free tier and a paid tier and are willing to incur the cost of users who will never convert. If a company doesn't actually intend to keep it "always free" they shouldn't make the promise in the first place

[gregoriol]

I think a company has to be able to change its commitment, but should not screw users at the same time. For example, if they want to remove the free plan, why not, strategy can change with context, the world is moving around the company, so then remove it for new users not existing ones and it's all good.

[culi]

Maybe that's fair but that's not what's happening here.

[hnarn]

It’s about the backpedaling. No one says it has to be free, they said that. They just have to keep their promise.

[RHSeeger]

And, honestly, if they came out with a statement that said (effectively), "Look, we're losing money here... we just _can't_ support free going forward. Here's our plan" that would be understandable. Sometimes you have a plan/goal, and you realize later that you were wrong and things need to change. But that's not what they did.

[hnarn]

I disagree, there is always a way to keep it free, if you care about keeping your promises. Especially in this case where the service is essentially locally encrypted json blob storage. There’s already plenty of premium functionality not included. If you have runaway costs due to abuse, just make up new limits to solve it.

[fontain]

Passwords are critical, losing them because you forget to pay or run out of money would be a disaster. I suspect they would still provide access in read only mode to non-paying users so it wouldn’t be a disaster if they didn’t offer a free version but I think it’s pretty easy to see why someone thinks it should always have a free offering.

[eviks]

That's what the backups are for, and also local password copies remain even without internet/subscription?

[donmcronald]

It doesn’t have to be free, but it can’t be set up so they can take it away from me. I self-host Vaultwarden to get that right now. Even if they break client compatibility, I still have the web vault with access to my passwords.

As soon as a company positions themselves to hold your data hostage, assume they will. I have no problem paying, but I’m not going to pay anyone trying to trap me. That’s the goal of most of these tech companies now.

My opinion and stubbornness doesn’t matter though. Identity control is getting lobbied into government legislation everywhere. Everyone’s going to pay no matter what, probably twice; once directly, once via taxes.

[AlexandrB]

For me it's not that it has to be free, but that it can't be a subscription service or cloud-hosted-only. It's why I left 1Password. I don't like trusting my password management to the whims of mercurial business decisions. It's only a matter of time until private equity smells blood in the water with this product category and starts "extracting value" through acquisitions and arbitrary price increases.

[Esophagus4]

> It's only a matter of time until private equity smells blood in the water with this product category and starts "extracting value" through acquisitions and arbitrary price increases.

My advice would be… If that happens, you can worry about it then.

It seems you could lose a lot of time and sleep protecting yourself against a doomsday scenario that will probably never happen.

[nekzn]

If I had to pay for everything I use.

[sph]

I pay for my email and the vault that contains all my passwords. Be smart with your money, not stingy. $10 (is it still? No idea) a year is an absolute nonfactor for most of the world.

[cocoa19]

I’ve been a paying user for years, but the free tier change announcement is a sign of the enshittification to come.

It means the old guard is moving away and potentially starting initiatives not in the best interest of the user. In the worst case scenario they will sell my data or introduce stupid changes that risk security.