It’s time to say goodbye to standalone licenses
With today’s 1Password 8 for Mac launch announcement, I thought it would be helpful to republish my mini-essay from this thread in our beta forums as it’s own post here.
The heart of the question was as follows:
I would like to see AgileBits make a clear and concise statement that anything other than 1Password.com is effectively "dead and gone". I am not unhappy with the direction the company is taking. My only wish is for clarity so that informed decisions can be made.
It was a great question and I couldn't help writing 1428 words to answer it. To make a long and interesting story short and to the point:
- The next generation of 1Password apps will take full advantage of 1Password.com (including .ca🇨🇦 & .eu🇪🇺) and as such will require a subscription to use 🔐
- Those with a standalone license can trade in their license for a special discount on a new 1Password membership 🙌🏼
- Gift cards are available for those who don’t have a credit card or prefer non-recurring payments ✌️
Of course the longer story is much more interesting so if you have 6 minutes to spare I'd love to share it. I'm a sucker for nostalgia, am not known for my brevity, and we have 15 years of history to go through so please forgive me for being unable to edit it down... 🙂
Let's take a moment to walk through the history of licenses & subscriptions, why we’ve decided to go all-in on memberships, and how license holders can trade in their license for a special discount.
A short history of 1Password licenses and memberships
When 1Password first launched in 2006 we only sold individual licenses. Subscriptions weren’t very common for software back then and a license approach felt right as we only supported Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger at the time.
This worked well for nearly a decade but by 2013 the cracks were already showing. By then we had client apps for all platforms, with each one requiring their own separate purchase, often across multiple app stores. And paid upgrades to major new versions were so incredibly painful for everyone involved that we rarely had any.
It wasn’t easy for customers to wrap their heads around the fact that 1Password was “licensed per person, per platform, with paid upgrades”, and quite frankly I would have a hard time figuring it out myself. It’s not only hard to understand but it’s difficult to even say.
We also had pushed standalone vaults (the underlying data format used by licenses) to their limit and couldn’t push them any further. Features like 2FA, secure remote password, account recovery, and many others weren’t feasible without connecting to a server to perform the heavy lifting.
Things came to a head in 2014 at NSNorth when our friends pushed us to create a service so they could use 1Password with their colleagues at work.
We knew we could do so much more for everyone if we created our own service. So we did. 1Password.com was launched to the world in November 2015 and it provided so much more than just another way to sync your data. Here are just the highlights on what our new service made possible:
- 🔐 More secure encryption data format and authentication process
- 📱 Two-factor authentication (2FA)
- 👨👨👧👦 Teams and families and businesses
- 🤗 Securely share items and files
- 🕓 Item history
- 🧯 Automated data backups
- 💫 Account recovery
Along with all these features 1Password.com also enabled a more intuitive setup across all your devices. We were in love! 😍
This love sparked me to write a post from the heart titled from a happy 1Password maker nearly 5 years ago. In it I shouted from the rooftops about why we love 1Password memberships and why our newly created hosted service was so much better than what was possible with standalone licenses.
The overwhelming popularity of 1Password.com
When we launched our hosted 1Password.com service 7 years ago we knew it was the better solution but we wanted to give our customers time to learn this for themselves. So when we released 1Password 7 in 2018 we provided the ability to subscribe to 1Password.com as well as the option to purchase a license to continue using Standalone Vaults.
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.
Even though memberships won by a long shot, our existing apps already supported both so we continued to offer standalone licenses. This included support as well as new features and updates for license holders.
In our new apps, however, we needed to revisit this approach…
Introducing the next generation of 1Password apps
Every so often one needs to go back to the drawing board and rebuild things completely in order to soar to ever greater heights. This happens frequently in software and a few years ago we decided to completely recreate all the 1Password apps from the ground up.
We knew it would be a monumental effort to recreate over a decade’s worth of features across 6 operating systems but we needed a new foundation that would enable us to add the features we had planned and could support us for the coming decade.
We also knew that we had pushed standalone vaults to their limit and wouldn’t be able to improve them any further.
So once we hit reset and restarted from the beginning we designed the next generation of apps with the assumption that they would be working hand-in-hand with 1Password.com (as well as .ca🇨🇦 and .eu🇪🇺).
This would have been an incredibly hard decision to make if memberships weren’t as popular as they are. Thankfully the vast majority of our customers already choose memberships so it made our decision much easier. 🤗
It’s time to say goodbye to standalone licenses
Given the overwhelming popularity of 1Password memberships and how much more capable 1Password.com is then everything else, our next generation of 1Password apps will focus exclusively on memberships.
And now that we’ve started to roll out the next generation of 1Password apps, it’s time to say goodbye to standalone licenses.
Thankfully switching over to a membership is simple and you can easily migrate over all your existing data. To switch to a 1Password membership all you need to do is create an account on 1Password.com, 1Password.ca, or 1Password.eu and add it to 1Password 7. See Move your existing 1Password data to a 1Password account for full details.
Thank you for supporting us all these years 🤗
As a license holder we know you’ve been supporting us for a long time. Many of you have been with us since the very beginning. We’ve been here for 15 years now and there’s no way we could have made it this far without you. 🥰
We’d like to thank you for supporting us all these years and provide a special trade-in discount for your license. Simply email us your license and enjoy 50% off your first 3 years.
That’s a great deal for those of you who prefer to pay-as-you-go (either monthly or yearly) but we recognize that some people would prefer to only pay when they explicitly authorize it.
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.
To take advantage of either discount, simply email us your license and we’ll let you know how to proceed to start enjoying your new 1Password membership.
Thanks again for supporting us all these years. Your constant support and encouragement means the world to us. ❤️🤗
Sorry for the essay but there was a lot of fun topics to cover so I wanted to get all my thoughts down in one place. 👋
Love Dave,
A Happy 1Password.com Maker ❤️ 🇨🇦
