Promises promises
I won’t name names but here’s what Agile Bits said way back when…
“Next, on to our business model. We've stated this on our blog, press release, though some articles may have left this part out, and other vendors have gotten rid of their licensed model, so I can certainly understand the confusion. And I can also understand the anxiety given that Adobe and Microsoft have moved to subscriptions. But let me state this unequivocally:
It is our plan to support both the licensed and subscription models going forward. I hope this is clear. We will be here for you no matter which way you wish to pay.
We have introduced subscriptions for a simple reason. Customers requested features that we need to operate our own server to do. Features such as vault permissions, easy to share vaults, automatic sync setup, optimized sync, etc. require our own server and thus it has ongoing costs. Ongoing costs warrant a subscription model. We've also done things to enhance the security to make sure AgileBits can not read your data, and increased the encryption strength to make it much more secure to store your data on our server than you might think. If you are interested in how that works, please read the white paper linked at the bottom of https://1password.com/security. Our Teams, Family, and Individual account customers are happy to pay a subscription for these features and have told us so.
But, we also recognize that there is a significant portion of our customers who do not need the features that accounts provide and would rather pay for a license up front and the occasional. This is why it is our plan to continue to support the license model.”
Comments
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My 2 cents - I'm not sure "it is our plan to" is the same as a promise.
The economics of software development and support has changed substantially, and very few of us have perfect crystal balls. I don't think anyone can reasonably expect everything to remain the same in perpetuity.
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I'm sure if they had used the word "promise," you'd argue it wasn't legally binding.
It hardly matters. What is "clear" is that the CEO reveals in a more recent post that it was never the "plan" to support the license model "unequivocally" once subscriptions were launched. The real "plan" was to support the license model ONLY IF most customers refused to subscribe.
" If our friends and supporters went with licenses for their individual accounts in droves then we would have kept our membership offerings focused on families and businesses. If there was a tie we would have needed to continue supporting both standalone licenses and memberships together for individual accounts. And if our customers saw the same value in 1Password memberships that we knew they had then we would follow their lead and go all in on memberships."
"It wasn't a foregone conclusion and we didn't know what our customers would decide."
Yet they were happy to state "unequivocally" that "we will be here for you no matter which way you wish to pay." That was BS at the time and they knew it. Obviously the fact that the very next major release turned out to be subscription challenges credibility, but in the CEO's retelling he actually admits the "plan" had been put in place years earlier, and support for the license model had been excluded from the very beginning:
"... 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."
I don't expect crystal balls, or things to remain the same forever. I do expect a company to either remain silent about their future plans, or if they do share plans, to be honest about what those plans are especially when describing them as clear, unequivocal, no matter what happens types of plans.
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I suggest stop complaining about things you cannot change and instead go forward to wherever you want to go. Complaining accomplishes nothing and doesn't change anything for you, while going forward brings you a step closer to your goals.
If it comes to business decisions, you as customer cannot do anything about that except speaking with your money. If you're not satisfied with a product, don't buy it. Money is the only thing that can make a company shape their business decisions differently. Unsuccessful companies vanish, and successful companies stay.
Don't take business decisions personal. I'd like to share a small story. 15-20 years ago, my company leased about 10000 PCs from a large well-known worldwide PC vendor. After a year, hard disks began to fail. We found thermal issues and proposed repair actions to prevent more failures. Vendor did nothing. More hard disks failed. Vendor did nothing. We canceled the contract because of the failures, gave the PCs back prematurely and even got damages for compensation. There was a call for bids for the new PC equipment. Vendor was one of the bidders. Vendor won the bid. We got new PCs from them (which worked). So don't take it personal and make the best out of every situation individually.
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Hello @1Customer! 👋
If you have a license for a particular version of 1Password then you're welcome to continue using that version for as long as you wish and for as long as it continues to work on your device. 🙂
You are correct that we're no longer selling new licenses. We ran up against the limits of standalone vaults and what they could support technologically and we introduced 1Password.com to push what 1Password can do forward. Once 1Password.com was introduced we quickly saw that 97% of people were choosing the new service and previous licensed customer were migrating over as well. With 1Password 8 we've decided to focus on 1Password.com memberships since they provide the best security and functionality for the vast majority of our users.
Our founder Dave wrote a great essay about our decision here: https://1password.community/discussion/129161/the-future-of-local-standalone-vaults/p1
We're currently offering big discounts on 1Password memberships to users who have been using our licensed version of 1Password. If you're interested, send in an email to
support+tradein@1password.comso that our billing team can offer you a heavily discounted 1Password membership.-Dave
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