Disappointing by new version and lack of customer satisfaction for existing customers
Hi,
I've been a faithful customer of 1password, using it on Mac, Windows, Android and iOS.
One of the main reasons I use 1password, and not other solutions, is that I don't want any of my security in the cloud. I want to manage my data from beginning to end. BTW, this is also a requirement for the place I work at, so saving my data elsewhere, is not an option for me.
With the new V7 release, I came to realize that I need to purchase a license for every single platform I use 1password. This is very disappointing, and demonstrates a lack of customers satisfaction for customers who have been faithful to you for a very long time. It seems that you are forcing and pushing to move to the subscription model.
Would you reconsider and come up with a solution for existing users, who want to continue using 1password in a standalone manner?
I appreciate putting some time looking into this,
AD
1Password Version: 6
Extension Version: Not Provided
OS Version: OSX, W10, Android
Sync Type: Standalone
Comments
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I agree with the previous commentators ... no upgrade pricing really means no appreciation by AgileBits for its longterm customer base. I have been with 1Password from the start but although I have downloaded 7 and it looks interesting, I shall revert to version 6. It should be much clearer in the briefing that one pricing applies to all customers.
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Pretty disappointing, I'm in the same boat, multi platform user since 2009...
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@andydev, @mscheurer, @henrymorris: I'm sorry you feel that way, but I just don't get it. We are offering a discount for you to upgrade:
If you mean that it's somehow bad of us to offer a discount to everyone, I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with you on that though. This isn't a zero-sum game; someone else doesn't have to lose in order for you to win. No one has taken anything away from you here.
If the concern is that this is higher than previous licenses, that's fair. But all of you have already benefitted from multiple updates that didn't cost you anything, and we think it's important that we charge sustainable prices for our products so that we can continue to develop, test, and support them for you and everyone else without resorting to selling out, selling ads, or selling user data. To be crystal clear, we don't do any of those things and don't intend to, and the revenue from these sales is what makes it possible for us to remain an independent Canadian company dedicated to making 1Password the best way to safeguard our privacy and security.
No one is being forced to switch to a subscription, but they exist because they enable things that customers have been asking us for for a decade or more, like seamlessly accessing their data across all of their devices. Apart from that, there is no centralized infrastructure or account system for us to do any of that, so customers also had to purchase apps separately from their respective stores, as they do today with the standalone apps. That's still an option because people told us they wanted to continue to use 1Password that way — purchasing only the versions they need and syncing their own data — but it does come with some significant drawbacks for most users, so 1Password.com memberships are what we recommend for most people.
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I think there is a real problem with the launch special as compared to upgrade pricing, though it won't affect anyone who has posted on the forum.
I moved to a subscription some time ago, but for any program where I have a licence I expect (and usually get) a discount on upgrading. And that discount applies whether I upgrade immediately or in six months time.
Whereas, by definition, a launch special is time-limited. If I had a licence but for some reason did not want to upgrade immediately, I would be as angry as some of the other posters if I had to pay full price for the upgrade. I suppose it will be too difficult for you now to ensure that old users get a discount indefinitely.
@andydev there was a Mac + Windows licence at one time, but in general it has been true that the licences have been per platform, so there isn't any change there. For you personally (I don't know if your work policies allow it), even with a subscription you can continue to use 1PW as before, managing everything yourself and not putting data in the cloud. You lose some benefits of the subscription, but you aren't any worse off than before.
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for any program where I have a licence I expect (and usually get) a discount on upgrading. And that discount applies whether I upgrade immediately or in six months time.
@danco: You're right. That's a really good point, and I appreciate you making it. I agree 100% that this is a a real drawback with the current system. I just don't know that there's a better way. We've tried many different approaches, and they have all had significant downsides. Making people prove that they're entitled to an exclusive "upgrade discount" has not, in my experience, proved to be the better way. So we've made the discount non-exclusive for 1Password 7.
I can't speak from a business perspective for other companies who continue to do upgrades that way, only from my experience here at AgileBits, so it may be that it's easier for others to do this. But my experience as a customer with many other software offerings is that support is often either incredibly slow, unhelpful, or non-existant. Sometimes when I write in with a question, I only ever get an automated response, I get a reply from a person long after I've forgotten that I even contacted them, or, more and more, I never get a response at all. So I've ended up in situations where the upgrade doesn't work out for me anyway. In all fairness, I know during some exceptionally busy times, the quality of our support suffers as well. That's something we're constantly working to avoid, and, actually part of that is not offering exclusionary upgrade pricing.
In the past, major releases have resulted in a tremendous increase (much more than now) in customer inquiries, and many of those were due to confusion regarding upgrade pricing: "How do I get the upgrade price?", "Which versions are eligible to upgrade from/to?", and too many others to recount. "Upgrade discounts" place a burden of proof on the user to provide information to verify eligibility. For some people, that's no problem. Heck, I've got my license information saved. But I think almost anyone saying we should go back to "upgrade discounts" would be surprised to see just how difficult and time consuming this is for many, many people. It means a lot of their personal time trying to track down the license themselves if they haven't planned for this eventuality, and a lot of back and forth with us as well as we try to help them find their license information in our system. A lot of people change free email addresses, paid ones when switching internet service providers, etc., and I remember many conversations that lasted weeks as people try to retrace their digital lives trying to figure out what information they used at the time of an original purchase, which could have been many years in the past. I've been in that situation too, and at times I've opted to pay full price anyway simply because the time I'd spend trying to figure it out is more valuable to me than the price difference in some cases.
So while I recognize that not offering "upgrade discounts" based on an existing license sucks in some ways, I know from experience that the alternative sucks too. I'm not sure how we'll do things the next time there's a paid upgrade, in light of both the not-unjust criticism we're receiving now and past history. But we'll continue to evaluate to see if there's a better solution we can offer in the future.
even with a subscription you can continue to use 1PW as before, managing everything yourself and not putting data in the cloud.
Indeed, It's possible to use local vaults to store data even when subscribing to 1Password.com. You just won't get the additional features that us hosting the encrypted data enables. Thanks for mentioning that!
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@danco - just echoing what brenty said, above - you've hit on the one Achilles' heel of our approach this time. But we couldn't find any approaches that didn't have some Achilles' heel. The truth of the matter is, we allowed things, especially on the Mac side, to go on too long without charging for upgrades. Between not having any good way to upgrade the Mac App Store for seven years, and then not charging for upgrades to either version 5 or 6 from our own store, partly to avoid penalizing customers who chose to purchase from us instead of the Mac App Store, and partly because we knew (as brenty alludes to) how painful for both us and customers offering "upgrade pricing" is, we wound up giving a whole generation of users the incorrect notion that 1Password didn't have a cost, except the first time. There is a not-insignificant number of users out there who could've purchased as early as 2011 and never paid a thing since, as we went through three full-version upgrades and countless incremental releases. And many, many more who may not have seven years without purchases under their belt, but do have three or four or five.
In the end, we went with this as the most-fair and least-intrusive option out of a field of options that all had substantial downsides. We figured having virtually everyone who hadn't purchased very recently pay the same price (still discounted nearly 23%) was better than the alternatives. I can't say what the future will hold, as we're still iterating on the just-released 1Password 7 across all platforms, so 1Password 8 really isn't on our plates in an active way yet. But we've learned some things along the way about how best to treat ourselves as well as our customers. Giving people the mistaken impression through our actions that one purchase = free upgrades for life not only does nobody any favors, it makes things worse when the time does come to upgrade. I know you and most of the people reading this understand that just as you don't - can't - work everyday for free, we can't either. And we've taken steps to make sure we don't hit this particular kind of roadblock in the future. Between the consistent, steady pricing of 1Password memberships and the decision not to sell standalone licenses in the Mac App Store, we think this will be the last time we ever have confusion of this particular sort, and we hope that winds up being both more fair and more understandable for everyone.
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Basically I agree with you, any decision has downsides (for users and for AgileBits) as well as upsides. And I suspect some of the issues are caused by technical decisions in the past, which can't now be changed effectively.
Just recently, I upgraded TechTool Pro and Path Finder. For TTP in order to get the upgrade I had to dig out my old serial number (easy, it was stored under Software Licences in 1PW!). Path Finder was upgraded from within the program and I didn't have to enter anything, I assume that somehow it was either able to check my old serial number on my machine or else it connected to an online database of serial numbers.
Not a complaint, just to show that may different models exist.
And to give you a point of view for future upgrades, as I can see it is a difficult decision for you, and users' views must be of value to you.
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Not a complaint, just to show that may different models exist.
Yup. :+1:
And to give you a point of view for future upgrades, as I can see it is a difficult decision for you, and users' views must be of value to you.
Yes. Yours especially, buddy. :) Thanks for all you do in these forums.
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@JamesHenderson - thanks, I think you hit most of the points I would've mentioned. :)
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