Why can we not have an explicit statement about 1Password being a subscription-only service?
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This should work. :)
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@MikeV99
Indeed, subscription is the way 1Password goes.
But you can use your working configuration (1PW7 + Classic Extension) as long as it works. It will support local vaults, and you don't have to switch to a subscription.
If you decide to use 1PW8 and the latest extension in the browser later, you can still decide to take a subscription to go forward with these latest builds. ;)0 -
I have an old Mac whose OS is no longer upgradable but it still runs great.
I assume you are here and use 1Password because you care about information security. How do you reconcile that against running an operating system that is not being updated? "Runs great" is great until you get hit with an unpatched vulnerability because you didn't update.
Will 1PW8 still run and continue to run on my old platforms?
I suspect not. Why would 1Password support operating systems that are not supported by the vendor?
Am I to be forced to buy new computers and devices?
Welcome to capitalism.
Rather than an annual membership, what would a lifetime 1PW membership cost?
They do not sell "lifetime" anything, but you can get high-dollar gift cards which would cover multiple years of service. I would recommend that you email them as they have good deals available through email on gift cards:
If this sounds like you we set up a special deal where you can purchase a $99 gift card worth $150 of credit (only available on 1Password.com), allowing you to use 1Password for over 3 years. Once those 3+ years are up you can choose whether or not to pay again. No recurring or automatic payments will be taken and your data will always be available whether you renew or not.
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@dteare I have bought every version of 1Password since it was first released and I've been a Mac user this whole time. I need the standalone license for Windows now. The subscription membership is not suitable.
Please.
1Password Version: 1-7
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: Not Provided
Sync Type: Dropbox0 -
Sorry for the late reply everyone. I took an extra long weekend for Canada Day and am just catching up now. 🇨🇦🎉
@TonyHall: Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us, including the irrational ones. 🙂 I’m sad to hear you are thinking of leaving us but I am very thankful for your support over all these years and for being so open, understanding, and caring in your reply here. If you do decide to leave after your research (it's a bit dated but this is a good place to start) is completed, I wish you nothing but the best of luck and ask that you stop by every once in a while to see what we’re up to. As always (subscription or otherwise), it’s always our responsibility to prove to you the value of 1Password and to earn our keep. I believe we do but we’re not always effective at communicating the value so I continue to appreciate customers like you who nudge us to do better in that department. 😘 Again, either way, I’m super thankful for you being part of our journey and wish you the best. 🤗
@Dr. Woo: I’m sorry to hear our move to subscriptions has caused you this much pain. I really am. All I can say is we did our best to make our 1Password membership a compelling value and with the price at roughly a paid upgrade every two years along with the additional features our online service provides, I feel we were successful in this regard. We certainly do care about all our users and have done our best to address many of the concerns we’ve heard from folks who were apprehensive about subscriptions. Things like keeping the price reasonable, to providing an option for yearly payments, all the way to creating large gift cards to allow you to purchase years of our service as a one-time, non-recurring payment. Along with the great trade-in discount for licenses it is my sincere hope that we’re able to win you over. In the end though I know in my heart of hearts that moving to subscriptions-only is the right thing to do and so we will be moving forward here. I hope this doesn’t mean it’s the end of the road for us but if this is an untenable situation, then I am sad to say we do indeed need to part ways. In either event, I really am thankful for your support over all these years and wish you the best of luck.
@ComplainyGuy: You’re absolutely right that the predictability of subscriptions is incredibly important for us as it allows us to invest more in the business and have confidence in knowing that we’ll be able to afford doing so over the long haul. There are many other benefits as well. I touched on a few in my post above and in my From a Happy 1Password Maker blog post way back when, but I didn’t bother diving that deep in either as there’s plenty of others who have written in-depth reviews of why software as a service is the best way to sell software for all involved. Now you mentioned offering a paid upgrade and I’m guessing you mean to repeat what we did in 1Password 7 and offer both. I tried to capture our rationale in my post above. It’s a long one so I can totally understand if you didn’t get all the way through it, but the why is covered there in depth. If you have questions or concerns after reading that post through, I’d be happy to discuss them.
@macindigo: I’m very familiar with the intrinsic problem you describe but in my experience it’s the exact opposite. For paid upgrades you need to stop releasing fixes for the previous version and build up to a big release. Not only are fixes and improvements delayed, but often the new release won’t be published until enough cool new features are added to create a big splash, all in an effort to justify people opening up their wallets to purchase the upgrade. And if sales for the new release don’t meet expectations, then another release is quickly rushed through for another paid upgrade or the company closes it’s doors. I’ve seen this many times and I personally have friends who have done exactly this – closed their doors and gone to work for the tech giants. With subscriptions it’s completely different. Fixes can be released when they are ready. There’s no intrinsic need to add features for the sake of a big splash but rather can be added for the sake of solving real issues. And with steady and predictable revenue we can grow the team with confidence. Now of course we knew all this back when 1Password 7 was released but as I described in my comment above, we wanted to present both options to our users and give them the choice. Users overwhelmingly choose our membership option and that made our choice much easier to make. While I’d love to be able to make everyone happy all the time, the reality is supporting both models requires extra effort on multiple fronts (from development to support to design) and we simply couldn’t justify moving slower in order to support both approaches.
@MikeV99: I see where you’re coming from. While I personally like to upgrade to the latest-and-greatest of everything, my wife likes to hold on to the bitter end until she’s forced to upgrade. Opposites attract I suppose. 😂 One of the unforeseen benefits of our 1Password memberships (at least unforeseen to me at the time) is given our service is used by so many businesses (over 80,000 now!), it’s more important than ever that we maximize the number of operating systems 1Password runs on. And given how reserved many companies are with upgrading operating systems, we need to extend our support as far as possible. With license sales it was completely different. Anyway, back to your question about a lifetime membership. This is something we don’t sell and I hope we never do. I’d much rather that we be forced to earn our keep on a regular basis rather than risk getting comfortable. At the same time I know monthly payments can be troublesome from a book keeping point of view so we offer a yearly payment option. I hope that helps.
Thanks again everyone for sharing your thoughts and giving us a chance to talk with you. 🤗
Take care,
++dave;
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Hi everyone, greetings from Switzerland!
I've been a 1Password customer since version 4 and I love it. Support is great too! I'm one of those who purchased a standalone license with Dropbox syncing. At the time, I felt this was a safer, more private solution to manage my data.I am quite disappointed to learn the next version (v. 8) will be subscription-only, thus dropping the standalone license. The concept of a yearly bill to use a software (however well done and essential) vs a one time, controlled purchase. What stops you from tripling the fee one day? You are not the first to shift system, though. Looking at Adobe, with a subscription-based service, the psychological risk for customers is to expect great features all the time to justify the price. New tools, new integrations.
I was reading about EU vs Canada servers and pre-paid cards. Please, please do not make things more complicated for no reason. One website, one login. Give the option to switch language/currency and to have international categories. You get the point. :)
Last but not least, one thing that worries me is putting my data into someone else's hands. You control pricing, limits and may very well decide in a year that the basic account can have 4 vaults and charge for each additional vault created.
That's why I'm worried and I wished there would be alternative syncing methods. I probably will not upgrade right away, but I cannot abandon 1Password either. In time, maybe.
Kind regards.
Michael0 -
I am quite disappointed to learn the next version (v. 8) will be subscription-only, thus dropping the standalone license. The concept of a yearly bill to use a software (however well done and essential) vs a one time, controlled purchase. What stops you from tripling the fee one day?
I got 1Password only a few months ago, and I explicitly chose the subscription model for my family. I usually prefer one-time purchases for the same reasons as you, but it's a bit different with password managers. It's obligatory a password manager stays updated, stays state of the art, keeps up with the general technical and security development. If it doesn't, I might as well use Excel for password management. And there is an integrated cloud sync, so I don't need to invent my own.
To enable development planning ahead financially to stay state of the art, and to ensure I am always running the most recent software, the subscription is the correct model.
If the fee is increased in the future, I would change to a different password manager with better pricing. Export from 1Password is possible (I verified this before subscribing). No software has to last forever.
1Password subscription is expensive, but in this particular case I feel it's ok and not unreasonably high.
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Hi @Tertius3 !
Thanks for your comment. I agree with you. In the end, being 1Password so cool and crucial, to fund the development a subscription model is the way to go.0 -
I usually prefer one-time purchases for the same reasons as you, but it's a bit different with password managers.
Same with me. I don't like subscription models and try to avoid them. But here in this case I feel secure and want to support 1Password to get it updated for the future. And yes, if there would be an increase of the fee, which I can no longer afford, I would think about switching to another manager.
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I never purchased a standalone license before, and I have no issue with the current subscription model, but .... that license card on the earlier version of 1Password is sooooo amazing!
Please add this to the current 1password client, maybe as an easter egg. We need some old-fashioned stuff in this new "subscription model" area.
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Coming to this late. My apologies.
I'm an OLD 1Password using having started back in 2008'ish. I remember when Agilebits tried to force users to use Dropbox ONLY and the revolt and the work around implemented so people could still use their vaults. I seriously doubt any of the concerns from back in the day have been fully mitigated.
I too will be a lost customer because 1) I don't pay for software subscriptions and 2) I want my vaults. I don't store my passwords in shared systems like 1Password, LastPass, or others.
So thank you for the years I've been able to use 1Password and for creating a market where there are more choices. I doubt we'll see a change back to stand alone licenses or individual vaults.
@CGDisplayBounds , thank you for the pointer to KeyPassXC. It looks like it will fill my needs on my computers and I use Strongbox on my phone.
Take care,
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Happy Sunday everybody! 👋🤗
I was just in my garden tending to my tomatoes and seeding my mid-year crops when I thought of this thread and remembered that I hadn't yet posted my comments here. Sorry for my tardiness but I get so many notifications it's easy to lose track.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts @michelebugliaro. @Tertius3 and @DenalB did a mighty fine job of answering your main points around pricing but I wanted to add that it's our job to make 1Password valuable enough to earn it's keep regardless of whether we sell individual licenses or package things into a service. I personally feel that a service makes us work even harder in this department as the recurring nature of the payments is more visible (even though it's less) and keeps folks thinking "what has 1Password done for me lately?". This is incredibly healthy in my mind and motivates the team and I to keep pushing things forward. As to your point about a single website, the tricky part is we need to physically host your data somewhere and some users (and in particular companies) have requirements about where their data is kept. So, we picked 3 geographical regions that we support: 1Password.com in the US, 1Password.ca in Canada, and 1Password.eu in Europe. It does complicate things a bit but for the most part you simply need to remember which region you created your account in and we do the rest. Gift cards are one of the rare exceptions where things are different across regions.
@craigary: I completely agree with you! 💯 on the design of that license card. 😍 @danvpeterson really nailed the design there and it's one of my fondest memories of 1Password 3. I'd love to find a way to get this back into 1Password someday. We've yet to have an epiphany on how we could bring this back so by all means please help us brainstorm on this. With any luck we can!
@TonyK: No worries for being late to the party. I was a bit slow myself. 🙂 I'm sad to hear that we will be losing you as a customer. I appreciate your kind words here and thank you so much for being part of our journey and helping us create a market for password management. I'm very thankful for the support of folks like you that have made it possible for us to create great apps, help people by solving real problems, and work at our dream job. I hope our paths cross again someday. Please stop by from time-to-time to see what we're up to and with any luck we can win you back. In the meantime, please stay safe out there and do your research before switching password managers as they aren't all created equal and few (if any) take your security and privacy as seriously as we do.
Take care everybody and enjoy the rest of your weekend.
++dave;
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I'm a long time customer and I'm probably out when 1Password 8 is released. When 1Password 7 came out in 2018 I paid $50 for a standalone license (and was happy to do so). Now I can pay $99 to last me three years? I don't see where I'm getting double the value, especially when many of the benefits of a subscription listed don't appeal to me.
@dteare Since 1Password 8 is in development I'm pleading with you to add a way to display the master password when the user types it. I can think of no more constant irritation I deal with in software than this. I have a main password that is over 20 characters long and I almost always have to type it more than once because I can't tell if I've made a typo or not. Other password managers such as KeePass and Password Safe let you do this. I've submitted feedback about this numerous times over the years. I'm using an older Mac without a secure enclave so unlocking with an Apple Watch is not an option for me right now.
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Thanks for sharing your thoughts @SpikeGuy and thank you for calling out the reveal password feature. It's a feature we've discussed at length internally and while it's not available yet, it is indeed a feature I'm hoping we can get in for 1Password 8. It's more involved than just flipping a switch as we need to make sure we do things in such a way that your password isn't remembered by the system or accidentally included in an OS spell checker or anything like that.
Regarding your math on the standalone license vs. "three years", things are a lot different when you don't consider taxes. I didn't want to complicate things but the $99 gift card gives you $150 of credit which gives over years (4.18 years or 4 years and 2 months) of service. That works out to roughly a paid upgrade every two years, which is a fair and reasonable expectation as the operating systems are constantly being updated and security is a constant process of iteration.
While I decided to keep things simple by assuming the highest tax rate possible and rounding down, there are taxes regardless so it works itself out in the wash.
++dave;
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Thanks for the extra detail @dteare . I remember you telling me that part of the problem was related to preventing keystroke logging, which is great that you're doing. Since a brand new version is upcoming I had to mention it again because it constantly is an issue for me.
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I have recently converted a couple of standalone licenses into a family subscription to more easily help my mother and I do like the benefits of the subscription model. I created the account at 1password.ca to keep the data in Canada as a matter of personal preference. Your explanation of the technical challenges with getting gift cards working in all regions makes sense. I'm wondering, though, if the discount on the $125 card (I can't seem to find a $150 gift card on the site) would be able to applied to an account in other regions by the billing department?
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My wife is 80 and I will be 80 in January. I have been a customer for many of those years and have gone through many upgrades. Rather than an annual membership, what would a lifetime 1PW membership cost?
You and your wife may outlive us all, but actuarily speaking, a life time membership may not be the financially wisest thing were we to offer such a license. But there are better solutions to the problem you correctly raise. (In the exceedingly unlikely event that we would offer such things, we aren't going to ask for medical reports or ages, and so pricing would be really unfair to many.)
We don't lock you out of your own data
Whether using a license or a membership, a security product like 1Password is going to very strongly going to discourage use on operating system versions that are no longer receiving security updates. What you and others correctly what to know is whether you will have to continually pay for memberships or upgrades (and newer hardware) to maintain access to your own data.
The answer is you don't need to keep paying (upgrades, memberships, hardware costs). Just occasionally make an unencrypted export of your data from 1Password and store that securely somewhere, whether that is on a USB device that you put in a safe deposit box or something other solution. The unencrypted exports do not require a working copy of 1Password to read. You do have a find a safe place to keep it, but it does mean that you will never be locked out of your own data. Put it in your calendar to make such an export every six months or so.
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I started using 1 Password in 2014 with Version 5 and switched to the subscription in 2017. Currently I'm using the beta of version 8 and enjoying it very much.
Now that you've decided to go full subscription-based with your own sync infrastructure I would like to ask again, as I did in 2018, if there is a chance that AgileBits uses their expertise for an easy-to-use no knowledge multi-plattform file sync service. The recent aquirement of SecretHub and their history what they wanted to do made me hopeful (but the actual product they created is quite different).
Even though brenty mentioned back then that the 1Password Sync Service just cannot be expanded I wanted to use the opportunity to bring this forward again. I know that other things have way more priority and that is fine. But is there a chance this could be realized or is it futile to ask further?
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I've been using 1PW for a long time, on both Mac and later on iOS. For instance, one of my existing macs is running version 2.12.1. If you're doing a significant rewrite, then I can appreciate that you wouldn't want to re-implement all the different methods of syncing that you have built over the years. And I can think of good reasons you might want to re-implement the whole program after many years of experience.
Still, I am disappointed in this move. I've bought every version of 1PW since whatever version I started with on the Mac (which might even be in the 1.x series), and every version available on iOS, so it's probably not all that much different for me to buy a subscription. But by centralizing all the data on your web site, that web site becomes an extremely high-value target. Also, the nature of the work I do means that I'm running on many different Macs and iOS devices, some of which are already not supported by the latest 1PW, but I've figured out how to get around those limits.
If the new centralized rewrite can still export data, is that exported data still in the same format as the data exported by version 7? This would be encouraging.
For me, the real irony of this is that I didn't login today to comment on the move to a subscription-only model. I logged in because I was going through the useful WatchTower feature in 1PW on one of my macs, and it informed me that passwords on this web site had been compromised (perhaps long ago?), and that I should change my password at this site. I realize this is just the discussion-board and not the site where all your security efforts are focused — but still, there is some bit of irony there.
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I was going through the useful WatchTower feature in 1PW on one of my macs, and it informed me that passwords on this web site had been compromised (perhaps long ago?), and that I should change my password at this site.
This doesn't mean 1Password was hacked. You are referring to the Watchtower function that checks your passwords with a big database with literally billions full of compromised passwords from all over the world. Someone, may be you or someone else, somewhere, used this password on some website, and that website or web app got compromised. Not necessarily the 1Password website. This way it found its way into the database. Since you're using this same password on 1Password that was compromised somewhere, you should not continue to use it on 1Password. If you use your 1Password password on other websites as well, it's time to change both to something unique.
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Please consider bringing back the standalone license. I purchased the standalone for 1Password 7 Windows. I bought a Mac over the weekend, and now find I can't use the software on my other computer. I'm aware I'd have to pay the cost to buy it again on a Mac, but I'd much rather do that and be in full control of my vault that's stored in my Dropbox, vs. trust my life being stored on an unknown Cloud provider's storage.
On a somewhat serious note, I'm wondering if the $2.99/mo subscription comes with an identity theft protection service and restoration to make someone whole, in the unlikely event that the subscription Cloud provider's storage is compromised? I'm guessing not, so it would make sense to continue to offer the standalone license, for those that elect to pay more to have the peace of mind.
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This doesn't mean 1Password was hacked. You are referring to the Watchtower function that checks your passwords with a big database with literally billions full of compromised passwords from all over the world. Someone, may be you or someone else, somewhere, used this password on some website, and that website or web app got compromised. Not necessarily the 1Password website.
Unlikely. I pick pretty obscure passwords, and in all the cases where WatchTower has warned that my password might have been compromised, the cause has been a security concern at the specific site that WatchTower mentioned. Also, I do use a unique password at every site, which of course is why I value an application like 1Password! Also, when I did login to this (the community forum site), it insisted that I change my password immediately. But if you're going to play the game of "blame the victim", please note:
https://1password.community/discussion/109038/forum-password-reset
But please note that I also explicitly said:
I realize this [security concern] is just [with] the discussion-board and not the site where all your security efforts are focused
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But my real reason for coming back today was to add:
What I really hope is that the new version can IMPORT password entries as exported from 1Password 7. The way I'll address my concerns is to make my 1Password 7 vault the authoritative collection, and I'll export entries from there and into the newer versions of 1Password.0 -
This doesn't mean 1Password was hacked
Please see:
https://1password.community/discussion/109038/forum-password-reset
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I too ask 1Password folks to reconsider abandoning standalone licenses.
While I appreciate the clarity and explanations from DaveT, his June17/19 post about standalone's future not being a foregone conclusion with 1P7 is a little harder to buy.
If there was a genuine interest in a real bake-off, burying the standalone option under several layers of confusing language on website and app was probably not the best move.
I get that the subscription model is a real advantage for many folks--but local syncing is a key element for lots of other forlks--for reasons outlined by folks in this thread.
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Hi,
Clear story! Only I use 1Password 6. Once bought from the Mac App Store. I think I bought 1Password 5, and later get an update to 1Password 6 via de Mac App Store.
Because of this I don't have a license code. How can I upgrade to 1Password 8 and use the subscription discount?
I did come across a license code of 1Password 2.6.0 in my email.0 -
Lots of great, respectful comments from this thread. I honestly can’t think of any other paid I’ve actively (happily!) used for over a decade. That’s really saying something.
I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say the membership sales are off the charts compared to standalone license when it was nearly impossible to actually find the hidden page to buy a license. You had to jump through a ton of hoops to hunt it down (if you were even aware it existed!).
My two cents: when you took investor money two years ago, everyone jumped down your throat and freaked out. 1Password swore up and down, nothing will change, we promise we’ll stick to our roots, we didn’t sell out, we don’t answer to them. You begged and begged to please just give you the benefit of the doubt.
I don’t see how this move to subscription only, which is financially motivated, can be interpreted as not related. Even if it is truly a total coincidence in timing of your funding, I imagine you would have suspected your users would correlate the two. From an optics perspective, it really surprises me this was the decision that was made, so soon after the funding.
You have so many users and you’ve done the math and determined losing the standalone license diehards is an acceptable causality 💔
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