I spent hundreds into 1P before the subscription model, as their apps were expensive and got them on multiple OS and for family members.

Then Dropbox decided (rightfully) that you shouldn't use your public folder to host websites, and 1P told their customers to either get a subscription or lose the online vault which is a critical feature of any password manager. They didn't even have the decency to offer a free year of the subscription to their current paying customers.

It would have cost 1P pennies to just host the vaults on S3, but they decided to force their customers to switch to the subscription model if they wanted to have a feature they had already paid for and 1P had been advertising for years.

I will never give a single cent to 1P again.

As far as deprecating the bring-your-own-sync approach, I understand this is legit flexibility that some customers want, and I'm glad there is a competitor that does a good job of it. Personally though, after many years of using 1Password + Dropbox, I must say I've had a lot fewer sync problems since migrating over to 1Password for Families. If I had a broad sync strategy maybe I would feel otherwise, but I don't—to the contrary, I'm moving away from Dropbox because of the shenanigans they are pulling with my OS internals, and maintaining a VPS or even an AWS account with S3 is a significant burden that I don't take lightly. As a product engineer, a single integrated sync is easier to provide guarantees, and prevents a lot of problems caused by third parties with no recourse to debug.

(I am also a happily paying customer of 1password; I strongly prefer the cloud offering...)

And that's beyond the fact that, in some sense, this aligns the business needs closer to mine. It is easier and in some sense, more fair, for me to pay for the software while I use it, and not when I don't. On the business side, it's nicer too. It pretty much feels like a win-win all around, except for certain circumstances. But in the happy path, it's basically almost entirely strictly better.

I feel weird being on this side of this argument these days, but it is what it is.

but I think a subscription model always depends on the use case, I mean it's probably impossible to pay for everything (considering that every software that we would use, will be using a subscription) I'm on a mac and lots of small tools are priced like 4-5 € which means I only need to buy a new version ones apple updates his os.

Or you can buy DaVinci Resolve for $295 and get a lifetime license. And they make a Linux version.

I make good money, and so dropping $20 on something for a new hobby is something I do without thinking, but $295 is something I have to consider. And I'm a software developer who makes a decent salary. It's more than 10x the cost. It takes fifteen months before that breaks even.

> And they make a Linux version.

I'm not a Linux user, so this isn't something I particularly care about these days.

Something I didn't talk about in the original post: I did try a few $0 editing programs at first, and I know that DaVinci Resolve stacks up pretty okay here, but one of the main reasons I went with Premire is how easy it is to get help with virtually everything, given how widely it's used. As someone who is at the "I don't even know what I don't know" stage, that's a real advantage. This isn't part of the whole "monthly fee SaaS vs one-time license" aspect of things, but it did factor into my overall decision.

In the end I went with the subscription because I it's bought once for all my devices, and is great for family use, with UX that's easy from children to grandparents. As a bonus, the Dropbox sync issues just stopped - their own sync works much better for me.

I do understand the frustration about subscriptions for everything but I'd like my password manager vendor to remain in good financial health, so I'll happily make an exception and pay regularly for my password manager.

> just host the vaults on S3

That's a fairly niche audience, and it's very easy to misconfigure S3. Product development is about making hard choices, and I'm ok with 1Password choosing not to do this, just as I'm okay with them not supporting WebDAV -- YMMV.

What I do wish is that 1Password would support a few cloud storage options (e.g. Google Drive, OneDrive etc) on mobile so that people who're not inclined to subscribe have an alternative, if only to squelch the inevitable complaints about subscriptions. When 1Password was a smaller company, I can see why one wouldn't want to do that as it'd take away precious dev time, but my understanding is that they have more funding now.

> I think 3.33 euros per months is about a good valance.

:)

It is just that I feel that 10 per year (personal) or 40 per year (family) is a fair amount to pay for this service.

I remember being frustrated by the Dropbox loss, and I’m still frustrated that they seem to push 1PasswordX over the native apps. Other than that I’ve only had 3 major gripes:

1) Lack of Linux support 2) Lack of good ssh key management 3) Lack of ability to self host

I’ve been eying BitWarden for awhile- How was your transition/migration to Bitwarden from 1P? How does the iOS integration compare to 1P? Do you self-host?

This is one of the things that pushed me to choose bitwarden over a 1password families subscription (even though I get the latter for free from my work).

I don't like the idea of credentials living in a browser extension (or even in a browser). I'm not confident in the long-term security of the entire setup, especially with the "evergreen" nature of modern browsers. I don't like telling my less-technical family that this extension is okay, but absolutely don't trust any other extensions.

> I don't like telling my less-technical family that this extension is okay, but absolutely don't trust any other extensions.

I do understand this dilemma, but I'm curious how you reconcile that against things like the benefits of filling from the extension avoiding the system clipboard & key loggers, the inherent phishing protection that comes from 1Password only suggesting credentials on sites where the URL matches your items, etc.

Telling folks the 1Password extension is okay and others are not is the approach we take internally.

- Ben, 1Password

I'm mostly punting this to macos. I don't give my kids admin rights on the devices I let them use and in general I think you need a11y access to log keys on mac, granting which requires admin.

AFAIK, modern browsers prevent interaction with the clipboard without user interaction, so using the system clipboard for passwords is not a huge deal. As a mitigation, 1password and other password managers clear the clipboard after a timeout.

On my linux machine, I use a bitwarden CLI in a script that either uses xclip to put the password into the clipboard or xdotool to type it directly. To my understanding, the security model in X is quite a bit worse than that in mac, but I prefer this over using a browser extension.

> the inherent phishing protection that comes from 1Password only suggesting credentials on sites where the URL matches your items

I can't wait for a passwordless world to come. For now, my kids only have credentials on sites that are relatively worthless, and I use U2F on all the sites/services I possibly can that have any value.

On the sites that have value but don't support U2F, I either accept the risk or try to find alternatives. Banks and financial services (I live in the US) are a perennial disappointment here.

I do use the bitwarden app on my iphone, and when you actually go through the password filling feature (instead of just switching to the bitwarden app and searching), it does suggest only those passwords that match the URI you're looking at. I haven't closely examined why I'm okay with this integration but not a browser extension on other platforms, but I am.

Transition is as easy as exporting your 1P database and importing it into BW.

Integration in IOS is very similar as 1P.

Overall, 1P's apps are more polished than BW. You notice it when you migrate over and after a while you forget about it.

There's one caveat and that is you've to pay BW $10 per year to get TOTP/2F AUTH support and offline support in the apps.

I hope we can win you back someday.

++dave; 1Password Founder.

I guess by "online" you mean access to your passwords using nothing but a web browser. I can see how that could be a requirement for certain users (e.g. employees permitted to make personal use of a work computer but not install any software) but disagree that that's a critical feature.

I used Dropbox to sync my 1Password vaults (including a shared vault with my spouse) from 2013 but never used the "trick" of publishing it through the public folder before Dropbox dropped that feature in 2017. I continued using Dropbox to sync vaults until last year when I upgraded to 1Password 7 and a family subscription.

I imagine you've probably never lost your phone while traveling.

Yes, like most people, I have not. If I did, on most trips I’ve had a laptop and anything critical would also be in the shared vault on my spouse’s phone.

If I didn’t have any of that, I could install the client on another device to access my vault, if someone would let me; a risk but possibly worthwhile in some critical hypothetical and not really different than using a browser on it (I don’t even know what such a scenario would be, if I was robbed of everything?). Or I could buy a device (even if I was robbed, I could call my parents to pay).

I did not know about it. Can you still do it with other provides such as Microsoft(OneDrive) and Google(Drive)?

Bitwarden enabled me to use it with Linux, Mac, Windows, Web, etc. _years_ before 1Password decided to join the party.

And there's no subscription to speak of - just a premium "extra features you may or may not want" yearly payment, which works out _much_ cheaper.

Finally - all my passwords belong to me. Self hosted server means that I keep control, not some random cloud.

I realize that most people tout self-hosted as a "benefit", and it might be a benefit for the demographic reading HN. But for the average person, self-hosting is far from practical. Most people can't realistically boot up a DO droplet and install Docker and Bitwarden.

Heck, I am a SysAdmin as a career. I build highly available architecture all day long, but for my personal/family passwords it is honestly not something I personally want to handle. Maybe it is because I actually work in highly available architectures all day long that I am more fearful of throwing all my passwords onto a $5/mo DO droplet, that by its nature is not HA. Sure I have the expertise to lock it down, keep it secure, keep it backed up, keep it updated, etc.. But I am paying $60/yr for the VPC ($5/mo x 12 mos = $60/yr), which is the same cost as 1Password for a Family plan and is more expensive than the $36 they charge for a personal plan.

So even though I am qualified to reliably self-host everything, why would I want to? Why not just pay the same amount of money for someone else to accept that burden? Plus that company is scaled up to be running their customers on far more reliable architecture systems than I would alternatively be using on my single VPC/droplet.

This isn't to shit on Bitwarden. In fact i have a ton of experience with both Bitwarden and 1Password. These are easily the two best options on the market. Both have close to feature parity. You can't go wrong with either. But I would just cautiously warn people that want to self-host Bitwarden. This is a major responsibility to self-host an app that contains such critical information. Before you click install I would do a thought experiment of what would happen if you lost your Bitwarden installation, and therefore ALL of your unique passwords across the entire internet. Now ask yourself, how confident are you that you can avoid that situation. Then remember that affordable alternatives exist that take that responsibility away from you.

This isn't saying that you shouldn't do it. Just that it isn't practical for most people. And I honestly don't see the draw for self-hosting a personal or family account. I would self-host a business account. But why bother with personal or family? Just get a hosted account so you don't have to play "IT Person" at home when your partner gets locked out of Netflix and can't access the password.

If you are already in the 'let someone else deal with it' camp, then Bitwarden is dead simple. It works everywhere and does a great job of keeping your vault in sync on any device. All for way less than 1Password.

I have more infrastructure in my basement than some small companies have in their entire organization. :D But in terms of relying on that infrastructure, run by me alone, for something as mission critical as 1Password? I'll pass.

- Ben, 1Password

I still choose to use 1Password personally, because the higher polish and experience is worth the slightly higher price for me.

Both are good options really.

Lastpass is now reduced to usage on linux machines, while bitwarden superceeds it on all platforms, even when new ones come in the future

— curious 1Password user

-- former 1Password user