The future of local/standalone vaults
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Welcome to the forums, @Scotty0844.
I started this thread with a detailed and very long winded explanation of the "why" behind our decision to go all-in on 1Password Memberships. Please give it a read and let me know any specific questions that remain unanswered.
Sorry for my verbosity but I had a lot to cover. 🙂
Take care,
++dave;
1Password Founder0 -
Hello everyone and Happy New Year! 🎉
I thought it would be great to kick off the new year with an update on self-hosting, how much interest we’ve been seeing in this feature, and what’s in our heads for the coming year and thereafter.
First and foremost let me thank everyone for their passion on this subject. We wouldn’t be here without passionate customers who cared about 1Password and our future, so thank you so much for continuing to share your thoughts with us. It really means a lot to me and the team. ❤️
Let’s start with some raw numbers. Since launching the survey we’ve had 5,277 people complete the form. We started the survey when 1Password 8 for Windows entered early access on June 15th, 2021, just over a year and a half ago.
Each response is stored in a 1Password vault using Secrets Automation so I get to see new responses throughout my workday. Here’s @Ben’s response when testing the survey, as well as letting us know he also wants this feature.
The responses covered a wide range of passions, from individuals who want their data to never leave their devices, regional restrictions, companies that require their data hosted on-prem, hobbyists who just want to have fun and play, all the way to those who believe subscriptions are the devil incarnate. As diverse as these are, one thing was constant throughout: passion. The passion for this feature is unbelievable.
As passionate as people are, I’ll be honest and say I was hoping for more responses. Having more would make it much easier to pitch this during our roadmap planning sessions. With that said, over 5,000 people is still a lot of people. Especially if you consider that most people don’t take the time to contact customer support, let alone take a survey. @roustem and I always assumed a 10x factor in situations like these so that starts getting into some big numbers. Still, if you haven’t had a chance to fill out the self-hosting survey yet, please do. It helps us gauge how much interest there is in this feature and I read every response and share the highlights with the team.
Ultimately we have too many competing priorities on our radar at the moment, and we didn’t see enough interest in this topic to get self-hosting onto the roadmap in the immediate future. That’s unfortunate and I’m sorry to have to break that news to you.
With that said, I was tremendously invigorated when discussing this feature with our product director and our chief product officer. Mitch got me really excited about the possibilities of a 1Password Community Edition, wherein the ability to host your own server was just one piece of many. And Steve was super excited about how a community edition could fit within our renewed focus on developers and the surrounding ecosystem.
While there’s a lot of excitement around this feature internally, it’s a big lift. One we haven’t been able to fit into our near-term roadmap, yet I remain optimistic that we’ll be able to find a place for it in the schedule in the future.
Please continue to share your thoughts in this thread. I’m notified of every response and while I don’t have a chance to always reply, I do read each and every post here.
Take care and have a wonderful 2023! 🤗
++dave;
1Password Founder1 -
Our company had to drop 1password support with this; and thus about 5,000 users needed to switch applications.
It was a pain.If there was a local cloud sync process, that would work for the business -- but having already migrated away, it's likely not going to happen. As a private user, while I could run a cloud instance, i'd rather not and rely on local NAS for file storage and backups.
The argument have been made. The majority of end users are not concerned about security, they want convenience. Which is a shame.
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@dteare Thanks for the update and the transparency.
One of the main reasons I am interested in self-hosting is for greater control over my data from the standpoint of data versioning and protection against data loss, not a lack of trust in the security of 1Password. I'm familiar with 1Password's Item History (https://support.1password.com/item-history/) and Backups (https://support.1password.com/backups/). But there are limitations, including no protection for deletion of vaults. (What if the IT guy goes rogue and just deletes a vault? What if I accidentally delete a vault--or delete the wrong vault?) Why can't vaults be recovered?? With self-hosting, I could ensure that I have unlimited, complete versions/backups of all of our 1Password data for as long as I desire and that no matter what catastrophe might happen on 1Password's end or what mistakes (or malicious actions) someone on our end might make (like deleting a vault, etc.), I could still access my data through my self-hosted environment.
Also, 1Password's export options (https://support.1password.com/export/) are too limited. I would feel a lot better if 1Password included an option for some form of automated, encrypted exports/backups (which is something some other password managers I use do).
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Better support for offline backups is something I'm advocating for. Thank you for sharing your use case on that. I've added those thoughts to our internal system our product team uses to help prioritize our efforts.
Ben
ref: PB30829569
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After the announcement of no more local Vaults, I have already switched to another product (my main vault with over 3k records. Family subscription). But 1P is still the best App 🤷
Is there any word on how long version 7 will be supported?
Wouldn't it be a way to be able to use the local cache file as a vault?0 -
Thank you Dave (and everyone else involved over the time) for this very open internal sight for how it stands about having self-hosted vault server instances!
It really has been some long time since the discussion about what is the most feasible way to have the vault data in your own hands, after the Linux client never got the local vault support and also the other versions sometime soon following suit to not support local vaults anymore.
Especially because of the fact that if something happens I'm the fool myself who is responsible for either loosing data, getting breached or just having more control over from where my vault is possible to be accessed from. (of course with maybe having to live that I can't access the vault outside from the apps or the browser extension, or any other drawbacks which might not be part of the vault server component)After I noticed the initial thread was closed I thought it is finally time again to show that I'm still here... waiting.
It's still a feature that's very high on my list...
and unfortunately my account balance starts to deplete (after a very long time), which also makes me look around how it's with other solutions.
The combination of 1P7/1P8 on Windows (value drag-and-drop into RDP or other remote connection windows still works a lot better in 1P7) and 1P8 on Linux (and 1P8 on macOS) still looks like the best solution, especially since the ssh-agent got implemented, but a very high demanded snow flake feature might still change everything. (it's very unfortunate I have think that far after all this time)Anyways, looking forward to seeing self-hosted vault servers being a thing! (sometime)
Cheers, lumarel
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I've been using 1Password since 2008 (!!). I'm willing to self-host, but I'd rather simply continue using a local vault. I will do that for as long as I can with 1P7, and then switch to a competitor if/when that is no longer possible.
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The same here. I will use 1P7 for the local vault as long as possible and than move on. I was using 1Password happily for 10 years, but it really makes me sick if a company thinks it knows better what is best for me!
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I have waited almost a year hoping you will add back local storage. You have not flinched. I am part of a network of consultants including PCI DSS and financial data security consultants. We work together but alone. None of us can migrate to 1Password 8. Local storage is an absolute must. It is simply not an option. Period. Others have said that too. The general position is tell them to support local hosting. Local hosting is also simply not an option. We call keep using 1Password 7, but someday that will run out, you will not maintain it and an operating system update is going to kill it off. You will offer us the option of never upgrading our operating system again, but you know that is not an option. Many of us are forced to migrate to the new operating system once security updates are dropped on the older operating system.
You can explain all you want. You can be passionate all you want. You cannot force the change. No amount of fancy AES-256 and explanations of quantum computing, passionate explanations of how much effort it took to redevelop in Rust will change the situation for many of us. We don't really care about the details, we care about the result.
Charge me $10 to give the feature back, cover some development cost. Turn the feature on after requiring us to acknowledge that Dave Teare is washing his hands of any risk of maintaining local data. But reconsider the decision. You are not the only developer and company CEO that has made a decision, doubled down on it, and then had to reverse course due to overwhelming complaints. Sure, not everyone is complaining, many don't have an issue or even understand what changed. Sure many people switched to subscriptions. Realize that many of them switched to subscriptions because you made it overwhelmingly hard to buy stand-alone apps. We did not switch because we wanted someone hosting our data.
My vision is there you are in a middle of a huge battlefield filled with flame, fury, smoke, debris flying all around, countless shell holes filling with water, your face filled with the grime of battle and your look one of furious determination. You are going to win this war on local data or fall onto the ground. There does not need to be a battlefield. There needs to be a reckoning with the countless customers that were once loyal and now have been left behind.
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That is quite the vision you have concocted @JRomer79. Based on their client list they are doing quite well with their current path. I doubt your offer to pay them $10 has much weight against priorities such as keeping IBM happy.
It has been years since AB dropped standalone vaults. I cannot envision a world where they bring them back. The vast majority of the world has moved on from such concepts. Perhaps it is time to re-evaluate your position? Your comments remind me of Charlton Heston's famous (infamous?) "from my cold dead hands" rhetoric.
It seems pretty clear that if there is to be any form of "local" 1Password again it will be in the form of self-hosting the 1Password.com server. While I hope they pursue that option the fact that they started surveying about it two years ago and have not even released a beta does not give much cause for that hope.
If standalone is a "cold dead hands" issue for you, then I would respectfully propose that 1Password is not a viable solution, and you should start looking for an alternative. Just my thoughts as a fellow 1Password user who used to use standalone.
Cheers.
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It's not my war, it is the issue IT Risk teams have with allowing data access like this application outside their organization. It's 3,500 of us, not 1 of us. LastPass certainly boosted their success. It's been a beloved application, but when you cannot use it, you cannot use it.
Certainly I paint a vision, but I'm making a point this was not a necessary change, it was a preference and a desire.
I respect that you respectfully tell me 1Password is not my solution, but it was my solution for 13 years and for over 3,500 of us for more than 5 years. Who changed? Did 3,500 of us get unreasonable? Another posting in this thread about 5,000 lost users over the issue. My $10 does mean nothing, that was not the actual point, was it?
IBM does have employees use 1Password. I'm surprised this change would have been made for their satisfaction. A provisioning feature would have allowed a setup or lockout of features IBM did not want implemented.
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I've been following and have commented on this issue for a while now. I too am one who has long held the position that one of the simplest things to do to secure password data is to NOT put it out in the cloud, and have long used a manual-sync option to keep my devices current. When I looked into the previous cloud-sync options I immediately dismissed DropBox since it was (is?) a young-ish company whose security and longevity I didn't feel I could trust. The only option I really considered was iCloud as Apple is solid with security better than most, but I could never bring myself to pull the trigger and move my vault.
Now we have 1Password 8 with its cloud vault hosting the only option. After trading messages with @Ben, @Lars, read @dteare's numerous posts, read white papers, etc, etc, I've learned more about secret keys, PBKDF2 iterations, password entropy and all the rest of it than I ever thought I would. Not to mention all that was uncovered and learned from the LastPass breach.
With that said, with a quality master password coupled with the secret key, I've slowly come to believe the risk associated with putting my data in the 1Password cloud is minimal. Yes, there's some small probability it could be compromised if my vault got into the hands of some nefarious individuals, but I really doubt they'd waste all that time, energy and resources trying to crack my data. There are simply too many far easier targets. If some governmental agency is after me - ?? - well then all bets are off.
The only other password manager I would consider is BitWarden - which does have a self-hosting option where you can implement an instance of its server/database. Presumably if 1Password ever offered a local or self-hosting option, it would be similar. It's worth saying this is more complicated than simply having a local vault, and anyone that sets this up needs to make sure they get it right and administer it properly.
As far as paying a 1Password subscription, I've never had a problem with that - this software and service is fully worth it.
As far as Electron, Rust and all of that, yes, some features of the 8 interface may feel un-Mac-like, but so long as the functionally is there, I'm fine with it.
So that's my current thinking, always subject to change, and thought I'd take a few minutes to put it out there.
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I been using 1Password since Nov 19, 2016 when I brought it on the Mac Store.
If you guys are going with sub only + no local vault I am just going to ride 7 out for as long as I can and then move to BitWarden.
1. The LastPass leak
2. iCloud actually supports end to end encryption nowSo why would I really trust my password to 1Password.com instead of having it end to end encrypted on iCloud as it stands right now?
If you can recover my account on your end there's a security vulnerability I won't have if I put it on iCloud/self-host.
I don't want to connect to your server every time I start 1Password. I don't want to link my password to my email.
I don't want the government to potentially have some backdoor into my password. (You are not going to fight a court order/any future privacy invading law for the users.)I get you guys want more money and revenue, just charge more for the lifetime buyout/standalone vault, I'd be happy to pay 100-200 USD once than be committed to paying 3 a month for years. I know the SaaS game you guys are playing and I will PAY EXTRA to avoid getting trapped into that. I want my privacy and I want my security. I will pay for them if you give the option.
If you don't I will just move on to other options. Remember Apple actually have built in end to end encrypted password manager now.
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Welcome to the 1Password Support Community, @Iwantlocal! Thanks for joining.
We're big fans of Apple's new(ish) Advanced Data Protection as well. However, it's not the same thing as a 1password.com account, due to the presence of the Secret Key for all 1password.com accounts. And remember: iCloud remains cloud-based also, unless you intentionally disable all iCloud syncing.
If you can recover my account on your end there's a security vulnerability I won't have if I put it on iCloud/self-host.
We can't. In multi-user accounts (1Password Families, 1Password Teams and 1Password Business), an Owner or Administrator (or Family Organizer in a Families account) can help you recover your account, but no one at AgileBits can.
I don't want to link my password to my email.
Not sure I understand this? Which password do you think you're linking to your email?
I don't want the government to potentially have some backdoor into my password. (You are not going to fight a court order/any future privacy invading law for the users.)
Fortunately, they don't. You can read about our [Security Model], but the most important thing to keep in mind here is a phrase you mentioned earler: end-to-end encryption. Your 1Password database that is stored on 1Password servers is encrypted at all times; all encryption and decryption is done only locally on your device(s) using encryption keys we do not possess and cannot derive. We even publish a guide for law enforcement which we make publicly available. tl;dr - we will indeed honor lawful court orders to provide information, but because we cannot decrypt your data, law enforcement would receive only the ciphertext itself.
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I've been using 1Password since 2008 (!!). Planned to hold on until 1P7 was dead or 1P8 brought back local vault support and/or self-hosting. Looks like the former has won and I have a couple of months to migrate to a competitor that supports the latter.
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Since the classic / 1Password 7 Chrome extension will become unusable later this year (https://support.1password.com/kb/202303/) I will be searching for an alternative for both work and personal use. I'm happy to pay for software and services but I refuse to allow my data to be held hostage by corporate greed in the form of mandatory subscriptions.
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I'm happy to pay for software and services but I refuse to allow my data to be held hostage by corporate greed in the form of mandatory subscriptions.
Your data is NOT being held hostage, you can still access, use as normal and even export everything in your freeze account.
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The obvious truth here is that moving to an online service has nothing to do with wanting to make life easier for your customers, because the easiest thing for them is standalone vaults that are synchronised over a service of their choice - such as Dropbox, which has always worked flawlessly.
This is simply wanting to charge your customers over and over instead of just once. You've seen some other companies turn their standalone software into "software as a service" and you want some of that pie.
What you've neglected is the fact that many customers are not at all interested in "software as a service". I see it all over the forums here and I feel it myself. I don't want to be locked in to a service and I don't want to pay for my software over and over forever.
So count me as another user who will be migrating to an alternative.
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When I migrated to 1Password 8 the migration stated it was not going to migrate local vaults. Now all the data I had in my local vault is in your storage server. This to me is unacceptable.
You must understand that some of your customers have policies that prevent us to store data outside our own servers. Did you consider this scenario?
Please bring back local vaults and use a manual backup and restore process for migration so user is fully aware that the local data is being moved to your storage servers. Geez!!
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Hello Dave,
I love being able to keep shared vaults synced with my family.
These contain common accounts, family software license and other non critical information.While me, my wife and both my father and her father all use local vaults for such critical information such as bank logins, IDs and so on.
Without local vaults I'll have to move to another software and ask for a refund to all my unused credit.
A final note, just because something is popular doesn't mean it should be the only option.
If instead you are trying to say that you want to maximise profits to follow what your investors are asking, and local vaults are not a money making feature, just say so and we can all be on our way.
This info from Wikipedia seems to show that you have quite a few investors, are they calling the shots?
"In January 2022, 1Password raised a $620 million Series C round, the biggest funding round in Canadian history, led by Iconiq Growth, increasing the company's valuation to $6.8 billion. Notable individual investors that took part in this round were Ryan Reynolds, Robert Downey Jr., and Justin Timberlake."Thank you for over 15 years of quality software.
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Hello, there has been an awfully long debate about local repositories, of which I myself am a proponent. There is an online form/survey, but nowhere have I seen a final conclusion/decision. So will there be a self-hosting option or not? Could I ask someone on the team for an official answer?
I think it would be fair to decide this topic once and for all and make it clear to everyone which way 1password will go. If online, a lot of users will definitely opt for the alternative and start actively pursuing it, if there's a local storage option (and feel free with a monthly subscription, it doesn't really matter) then hooray we're staying.
Please, make it somehow definitive - now.
Thank you, your so far satisfied long-time 1password user
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To the previous comment, please see this 1Password reply where they said that 5K+ users requested standalone vaults (and they suspect the real number is 10x that) and how that still wasn't enough $$$ for them to care.
In my opinion, and take this with a grain of salt as I obviously can't speak for 1Password, I suspect they were riding high on the covid profits like most tech companies and could afford to ignore paying customers like us. Now that the covid remote-work boom is over, thousands of employees are losing jobs across the tech industry and, who knows, maybe 1Password will eventually want our money after all.
I'm not waiting around. I've done a lot of homework comparing and settled on migrating to Apple's native Password manager (keychain). It has a CSV import option, can still do things like one-time passwords, and I'm not at the mercy of a third-party app. Just don't enable iCloud sync and then you have a standalone password manager with no online syncing. It's more clunky for sure but not as bad as other apps I've tested and I'm avoiding any companies with known security breaches, like the big LastPass news or KeePass master password leak. Ultimately, I'm ok with Apple's keychain having less bells and whistles in favor of keeping data offline.
If anyone at 1Password still reads this thread, I want to be clear that the subscription pricing was never the deterrent. I would've paid 3x the amount you're asking but I'm never going to store passwords online, period.
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After so many years of discussions and so many replies, I believe very few things have been left unsaid. When all things are said and done, it's just about whether AgileBits will think it's worth their while to invest time and resources in reintroducing support for local vaults.
Although since the introduction of the mandatory subscription model, I have moved on to a competitor offering which I self-host, I have never forgotten 1Password and routinely return to the forums to check on its status and development. I have completed the self hosting form, I have enquired about the current status several times in the past and although I don't kid myself about what the chances are, I choose to remain optimistic.
I never willingly left 1Password; AgileBits just took 1Password in a direction that did not meet my needs and requirements. I keep hoping that one day I will visit the forums and see an announcement for a self hosted application with a traditional licence model (or even a lifetime option). Oh well...
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If anyone at 1Password still reads this thread, I want to be clear that the subscription pricing was never the deterrent. I would've paid 3x the amount you're asking but I'm never going to store passwords online, period.
I want to +1 this comment. I'm still using 1Password 7. My resistance to 1Password 8 is entirely about the requirement to use your backing service. I'm fine with a subscription (though it's exhausting how many subscriptions I'm managing these days).
But, after all of the venture capital you've taken, I feel the need to defend myself against short-sighted investors who only care about the next quarter, or about the stock price this week. There are too many examples of companies that become hollowed out husks in service to investors, etc. I don't want you to have my passwords, even if (you say) you can't read them.
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I just submitted my own reply to the survey. How is self-hosting still not even on the roadmap? How is 5K users that actually replied to the survey (as of January 2023, a whole year ago) not enough to show there's more than enough interest in this feature that it needs to be prioritized yesterday and implemented as soon as possible? (Especially when you consider that getting people to fill out a survey at ALL is an achievement?!)
I'm not asking AgileBits for magic. I'm asking that they take the feedback of literally thousands of users and act on it so as to keep their customers safe.
@dteare if the security of your customers is the company's top priority (which you claim is the case, and I BELIEVE you when you say it), then please put action behind those words. Get self-hosting on the roadmap no later than the end of first quarter of the fiscal year, and get the feature built and launched before the end of the fourth quarter. That's an entire year to get this feature built and tested. If that's not enough time, please give a thorough explanation as to why that is the case after you get the feature added to the roadmap, and then include a timeframe re: when people can expect the feature to be rolled out to customers.
I wish I'd known this survey existed a year ago (or even two years ago, when the question about self-hosting was initially posted to the 1Password sub-reddit, which I wasn't aware of at the time either). That said, if 5,000+ users isn't enough interest to make the company act on building the feature (let alone the 50k+ that you are apparently assuming is closer to the number of interested individuals based on your 10x rule), I suspect that even if I had known, my own survey response wasn't going to move the needle in the slightest. I cannot believe 5k+ users is not enough to spur action for this company, and I really have to wonder if AB's first priority is really the safety and security of my family and I and not - ya know - profit.
BitWarden, VaultWarden, and GoPass are looking better and better by the day. I truly hope AgileBits can win back some of the lost trust here by getting Self-Hosting onto the roadmap sooner rather than later. If not, it'll be the third 10+ year business relationship I will have severed in the past year because of a lack of respect for the safety and security of my family.
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Hi Dave. I'm sorry that it took two years to find this thread. So, I've been using 1Password since version 2. I'm a cybersecurity and IT senior spec and understand the motivation to move on from local/standalone storage.
I've been following Agilebits since the beginning. I've been using 1Password for a long time, as well as Knox and other stuff you guys did. I always trusted you and the information you published in the blog to decide to keep using 1Password during all these years. I know that I avoid headaches by relying on you guys and not using other solutions like LastPass.
Right now, more than ten people from my family use 1Password, and for more than a decade, I have recommended hundreds of customers to you.
I'm not repeating all the yada-yada from all these comments are already done. I'm just sad about this decision. I've been using third-party storage because my data will be safer if not stored by the company that develops the software that encrypts everything. That's the reason that I use 1Password for anything. By removing it, we must trust Agilebits more than we are trained to.
I'm also sad that, somehow, you are turning your back on the first and long users that supported you to become a large company. Unfortunately, that's common these days. I thought (maybe hoped) that it could be different with 1Password.
I want to end that with a question. I'm still using version 7 and would like to know if security issues will be fixed over time or if you recommend migrating out of it. Thanks for everything, and I wish you the best.1 -
According to the Jan 2023 post, the self-hosted survey had gotten 5000 responses as of the time of that writing and they assume a 10x factor which would be 50,000. If that is not enough for 1Password to consider self hosted vaults, then what is the survey response number that will move this capability higher on the priority list?
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Also curious to know what the survey response count is now.
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