Cannot manage my subscription

daiji · August 2019

I'm on the Individual Plan, billed through the App Store. My subscription should be managed in iTunes.
However, my subscription cannot be found in iTunes. I assume it is because I changed my country of Apple ID from Japan to USA.
When I started to subscribe, I purchased 1Password through Japanese iTunes Store. Currently, my Apple ID has changed to USA. My credit card, billing address, and iTunes Store are all USA's.
I am not able to access to my subscription either iTunes or 1Password website.

1Password Version: 1Password 7 Version 7.3.2 (70302003) Mac App Store
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Not Provided

AGAlumB · August 2019

@daiji: 大変だなぁ… I can't say that I've heard of that happening before, but it makes sense. As far as I know there's no way to access purchases of any kind for another region than the one your Apple ID is set to. You definitely won't be able to do anything with it through our website if you're being billed through Apple, as we simply don't have access to their systems. The best thing to do would be to contact Apple to see what they recommend. Even if you deleted your 1Password account (I'm not recommending that, but as an example) you would need to cancel with Apple since you're subscribed through them. They have some suggestions here, under "If you still can't view your subscriptions":

https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT202039

I don't think any of that applies to your situation, but there's a way to contact them. I think that would be best, as I wouldn't want to tell you the wrong thing and complicate it for you further. I'm sure they will be in the best position to advise you on this, and I'd be interested to hear what they suggest.

99Passwords · September 2019

This happened to me, too @daiji - which I just discovered today.

I subscribed in Jul 2018 while living in the U.K. and on the U.K. App Store. I moved back to the States in Jan 2019 and was just thinking about when/if my 1Password subscription was going to renew as I had not received any emails. I couldn't remember what I had signed up for, so when I went to check the Billing on 1Password.com, it said it was managed by Apple.

But when I went to Apple, there was no record of a subscription. On a hunch, I switched BACK to the U.K. App Store and found my 1Password subscription sitting there getting ready to renew in a few weeks.

I was only able to switch back to the U.K. App Store because I still had a valid credit/debit card from the U.K., having not had the time yet to properly close out my U.K. bank account. You have to have a valid form of payment in most countries that Apple does business in, so even though my U.K. balance was basically zero, Apple still let me switch back.

It will get interesting now to see what happens. I cancelled my U.K. subscription while logged in the U.K. Apple store. As you all may know, when you do that, the subscription doesn't immediately cancel, but is still "good" until its normal expiration date. So, I'm technically still active under the U.K. App Store for a few weeks more. I switched back to the U.S. App Store now.

When I login to 1Password.com and look at the Billing, it still tells me that Apple manages my subscription, but that is likely because Apple still flags the account as 'paid' or 'paying' as far as 1Password can see. So, I'll have to wait and see what happens in a few weeks when the U.K. App Store doesn't renew my 1Password subscription.

My expectation as a customer is that in a few weeks I'll get a nice email from 1Password letting me know that my subscription has expired and offering me a variety of solutions as to how to proceed. My other expectation is that there is some kind of 'grace' period where I can still access all my passwords, meaning that I won't suddenly go from being "active" and having zero control as to how to change my subscription (which is my current status) to suddenly being locked out from 1Passwords logins on 12:01AM on the day my subscription renews. Of course, I've been around computers and systems long enough in my life to know that, like the response from 1Password above, not every scenario has been tested and explored and that machines are heartless... ha ha. By which I hope I won't have to send in a support request to 1Password the day my subscription expires and can get a week to figure out what I want to do.

Because I might not want to tie my 1Password subscription to Apple again. That is my normal default mode (not trusting the payment and subscription systems of most software companies and preferring instead to let Apple manage/strong-arm those software companies into reasonable compliance), but in this case, considering the hassle of what I've already experienced, and not yet sure what is yet to come, and in additional consideration on how critical my password manager is to the rest of my digital life to even being able to function at all on my machines and the internet, I'm a little worried that I could have gotten stuck in the cold after the fact, had I not happen to realize this today just luckily a few weeks before the U.K. App Store would have attempted to renew my U.K. Subscription (and failed) and then my 1Password account could have been shuttered secretly, or I would have been sent off to the Spice Mines of Kessel or something.

BTW, the reason this triggered in my mind was stumbling across this thread: Ask HN: How comfortable do you feel using cloud-based password managers?.

So now that I spent my morning chopping through this problem, and in addition to contributing to 1Password's KB, I hope that everything goes smooth sailing from here on out. After three years with LastPass which I was never quite thrilled about, and which never was quite as "nice" on my Mac as 1Password is, I'm hopeful that I see some iterative improvement on other matters in 1Password soon. Now that I'm registered on these forums, I guess I need to get involved and have a voice, too. Although sometimes I wonder why paid software these days seems to increasingly operate like Open Source stuff on Github. I mean, if we all have to jump in and troubleshoot and ask for what would otherwise be "obvious" improvements, it's almost easier to just learn Rust or C++ or something and just build our own (okay, I'm kidding a bit here, but you get the point!). Let's go 1Password! The software is not anywhere complete yet! Don't get all corporate on us.

brettbollman · September 2019

@99Passwords Thanks for your help with this unique situation... I'm sure your post here will be helpful for others in a similar situation.

And yes... you are correct that your Apple subscription will remain valid in our system until it expires with Apple. When that happens, or when any subscription becomes past due, the account moves into a frozen state. There are a handful of things that happen in a frozen state, but they are most easily summarized by saying that the account becomes "read-only". This means that your data is always yours and always accessible, regardless of the state of any subscription. Here's a more detailed article on what happens when your account goes frozen:

https://support.1password.com/frozen-account/

We definitely love Apple subscriptions and how convenient they are for everyone who choses to use them. We also understand that having one place to manage a bunch of different subscriptions is also very appealing (in most cases). They can also feel more secure as well. That said, it does limit our ability to help in situations like this and can create a bit more work for everyone involved. This is typically why we try to steer people towards setting up a subscription directly with us. It just allows us to more readily help when issues do arise.

So in these situations... continue to use 1Password until the subscription expires... or at least until you get close to the expiration date. At that point, reach out to us at support@1password.com and ask for your account to be switched over from an Apple subscription to direct billing. Unfortunately, this change on the account is only possible through a change we make on the back-end of our service. We do that because we want to make sure people don't accidentally set themselves up to be billed twice... once by us and once by Apple. So you'll be asked to confirm that your subscription is cancelled and once that is confirmed and the switch is made... you'll be able to subscribe directly with us.

If you'd really prefer keeping your subscription managed with Apple, it may be a little bit trickier. First, you'd need to re-download 1Password from the Mac App Store in the new Apple region. Once you open the newly installed 1Password, you may see the option to subscribe but there is the chance that the option won't appear. In which case, you'd need to dig around inside of your macOS keychain to remove a specific entry. In this case, I'd recommend reaching out to support@1password.com to get personalized help with getting things dialed in here. But once again, if this happens I think you'll also receive the recommendation to simply change where your subscription is being managed.

Hope that helps!

99Passwords · October 2019

Okay, gotta say that the "frozen" state of my 1Password account, which happened yesterday, was not as pleasant as it first sounded. I also can't export (which is a bit more restrictive than the "read only" summary you mentioned implied). I can't even move items from one folder to the next. I can't add a note to an existing password login. It is truly "frozen". And there's a lovely warning everywhere (twice in the desktop app on every view) saying my account is frozen. I literally am having flashbacks of being grounded as a child. Except this time I didn't do anything wrong.

I would describe the "frozen" state to be more of a hostage situation: basically, 'pay us' now, or the software quickly becomes almost useless. Somewhere, some clueless product manager is saying "yeah, but at least we didn't stop you from accessing your existing passwords", but that merely proves my point: it is, indeed, quite similar to a hostage situation. If you went so far as to stop someone from accessing their passwords altogether, that would be just cold-blooded murder, and like any hostage taker, once the hostages are dead, you don't have any leverage anymore.

In the nutty world of SaaS we presently are living in, you have to maintain leverage. Thankfully, the day is soon coming where individual users will rise up and take back our machines and software. 6000+ SaaS businesses can't last; as the big dominos fall (WeWork, Uber, etc), the little guys will have to adjust - or fall, too.

I for one am plenty sick and tired of being nickel/dimed for everything from $1.99/mo to $9.99/mo for every single bit and byte of software. I am hardly alone. It was one thing when some companies made excuse after excuse as to why they "had" to convert to subscription models, but time and time again, consumers have proven that the "promises" of better software never arrived. Subscriptions made many companies downright lazy, and some (Adobe) became even hostile.

Look at the massive number of subscription offerings for basic note-taking and word/doc editing. It's truly madness. I literally could still whip out my 486DX, DOS 3.1 and WordPerfect for Dos 5.1 and STILL be more productive in typing a letter than 99% of the offerings out there. (Granted, it's more than just typing a letter, I realize, these days).

So, in the end, I think this bitter taste in my mouth at the sudden and extreme 'frozen' state, along with the above hassle I had with my foreign iTunes subscription, along with other incidents (unrelated to AgileBits) with other SaaS software the past six months or so has settled it in my mind. No more.

I realize I'm a bit more techie than some. If I had to, I could go back to using Vim for everything. I can encrypt my own password file. I don't need my hand held, in other words. It's not even about the money since most of these fees are rather petty (thank goodness no one balances checkbooks by hand anymore; we'd spend 3 hours a month just clearing all our SaaS fees).

SaaS might be fine for B2B applications, but in my mind at least, I don't think this is a working model for personal use. It's a hassle and I want to spend my life with my children, sleeping, reading quality books, or outdoors doing things - not managing my software subscriptions. I'm done with it.

So, I'm not renewing. And since 1Password doesn't allow me to export, I'm not even going to give them the satisfaction of a single monthly payment of a few bucks just to regain that feature. I'll use the copy/paste feature and take the time to clean up and get rid of some other services and logins I should cancel as well.

Firefox's new service is free (albeit very limited in terms of fields/notes) and several other services are free. But it isn't about the free vs. paid. It's about the paid vs paying-forever.

I'm much more interested in a company that would sell a high-quality piece of software with a relatively reasonable lifespan of support (e.g. 5 years) but that would STILL keep working beyond that (maybe for people who keep the older O/S, etc).

As software developers know, we don't use most software every day. For instance, my FTP client that I bought (Transmit 4) still works just fine. I like the features in Version 5 but they now want $25/year. No thanks. I'll keep using version 4 for now until it becomes important enough to find a single piece of software. I use FTP maybe 5-6 times/year (yes, it surprises me too sometimes that I'm still using FTP). That means, I would have paid the developers $100 over the last four years for that very tiny privilege to use their (relatively nice) software. They know it all too well. Which is ridiculous when you consider how "free" the ability to FTP already is.

Same goes with password managers. Technically, I could just encrypt all this in a text file on my desktop (and not have to worry about third-party servers, too!). 1Password is a very nice solution, but it simply isn't worth what they are asking. Even so, I have no guarantee of future development, interoperability, functionality, etc., with a subscription. I just have 30 days. And I'm way too busy to deal with that risk factor. Past performance, as we've seen, is NOT a guarantee of future performance. When the economic crash happens (as is already showing signs of doing), little companies will be the first to say "sorry" and disappear off the internet. I need to make sure my software will still work for a reasonable amount of time.

So, for a little math fun, even though AgileBits wants $3/month for the personal edition, that's $36/year, or $180 over five years. No way. I'd offer $39 for the software with a 5-year support agreement. (That's just support - that it works on future editions of the O/S - not new features or improvements). If they, like the makers of BBEdit, later offer some really great "can't live without features", I'd agree to pay another $39 for the new version, unless I just bought within the last 12 months, then it should be free or low-price ($9).

For that price, I expect that the makers (AgileBits) can not reach into my machine and "freeze" or cripple my paid software. But since I'm "renting" it from them presently, they are/were able to do that. Oh, but what about storing my stuff on their servers in order to "sync" with iOS, etc...?? Sure, I'd happily pay them another $12-20 (depending)/year for secure storage. But THAT is very different than them tampering with my paid software. Thus, let's assume $15/year for passwords storage (and let's be real here... we are talking a few kilobytes per user) at 5 years is $75, plus my original software purchase of $40, is $115. It's a bit of a "savings" from the rental price of $180, but the point is that I'm not suddenly EVER crippled by AgileBits. I can also (optionally) at anytime stop syncing my passwords without any risk of my actual software being tampered with.

Just sign me... so tired of software companies thinking they are bigger than their britches... they are not. AgileBits was a good company at some point, as near as I can tell, but they fell victim to the same rat race as everyone else. Hard to believe there is a single 1 or 2-man operation out there that is offering the same thing for free (I won't name other competitors here out of respect for AgileBits own forums). I don't understand how this whole password thing became such a big business. I like the convenience, the security checks, the password generators, the auto-fill plugins, and what-not, but I have to say, for all the hassle I've had with it, and the company I used before 1Password, it's a bit hard to criticize old timers who just use a .txt file on their desktop. Maybe they know something we don't.

Ben · October 2019

Cannot manage my subscription

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