I wouldn't mention 1Password. It's a cornerstone for your digital security, if you're using it. As such, I don't want it free, I want to pay for it. My current family plan suits us very well and I'm very happy. Security is hard and I want it done right. Not to say that free tools are bad and paid tools are always good, but it certainly helps.
I also do want "easy" things to be free, like a note-taking app.
I think OP is talking about how 1Password stopped letting you use the one-time-purchase version and pushed everyone to the subscription.
Personally, I was pretty frustrated at that shift because I successfully and happily used old versions until it was “time” to update (2 then 4 (which was at the upgrade cost), then one more before I was pushed to the subscription). It always worked great. Tbh I’m still frustrated that their choice to self-host the syncing service became our costs (I used Dropbox just fine and that didn’t cost them anything), but now that I’m past the sticker shock (my costs easily went up 8X) I’m more comfortable with the stability of their company and breathing room they have to build the hard technology.
Thanks for bringing it up: 1Password is a necessary example for this debate.
I, too, have fond memories of the old one-time purchase modality of software vending, but I have to admit such an arrangement is largely untenable for any software company which wishes to maintain a high quality product across multiple platforms over the long haul.
Regarding building in their own sync, I think it’s actually a good thing. Naively syncing encrypted files can’t achieve the reliability of conflict resolution that a semantically aware app-level sync can.
On a side note, I moved away from Dropbox a couple years ago as their product became bloated as they seek growth with increased desperation. That is not a trait that I want in a company I allow to install kernel extensions on my machine.
The "naive" apps, like KeePassXC/Keepass2Android do have app-level syncing of conflicting files. Granted it's more cumbersome than it would be to use a cloud service, but works very well. I end up using it more often than I'd like to.
Pretty sure 1Password was always paid? And you had to pay for different platforms. I bought it a couple of timesand paid for a couple of major updates too.
I bet it was the App Store and the Mac Store where you couldn't pay for updates that started them thinking about a subscription model.
Yeah grounds for a suit. Unless of course they don't fuck up, that's a different story, then no suit and payment will be forthcoming. Like a bank. Password managers are banks.
Subscriptions are highly fetishized by the current accounting system, because they seem more predictable basically, and plus there's a lag between no longer using a service and discountinuing the subscription, that's like four free months at the end with no support calls no use no opening the app, nothing. Not even electricity costs. For that user in those months you might as well have 0% uptime. It's cheap. Except billing because you keep getting paid! And when they leave it's generally not a chargeback, plus you can be a bitch to unsubscribe from to the narrowest extent permitted by the law, ask Google not to lead people to the answer to how to unsubscribe on the first try or SEO it, in some way, hey that's solid business plusses and minusses. Especially the plusses for the first-person, the business owner, the first-person in economics too, for whom the price and quantity axes on economics charts are switched. There's also the idea that for a business to be a business it has to be repeatable. It's a sound idea.
And there's tons of businesses that make sense as a subscription. If you want to reward a business for doing a great job, try to subscribe to it under some pretense because that revenue will go much farther in business terms to strengthen it. I've done that, I did that for Beorg. I already bought all their unlockables. Even the ones I didn't want. Tipped them (him? I think it's a one-man show) a bunch of times. Then I subscribed thinking of all the good that subscription would do for the startup, instead of eg tipping.
Then it broke and I couldn't use it, like the calendars got out of whack. Plus, it's a todo app, ie I nag myself with it. It's like an alarm clock. There's the alarm clock effect.
Alarm clock effect: no matter what song you choose for your alarm clock, Beethoven's 9th the Beatle's biggest hit ("Yesterday" I think it is), any song any any song: in a week you will hate it. If it's your alarm song you will hate it. Hatred. Somethings are beloved, this is behated. I think it takes one year of not hearing it in any context to recover from it for every single time it wakes you up early. It's all in the interest of not getting fired for 8 more hours or not getting denied from an institution. Protects against existential threat of sleeping in.
Agendas are similar. And password protectors are similar. Existential threats. But in the case of password protection, I don't want a subscription, then what happens when I can't pay? Basically lock me out of everything, either explicitly or with hexes or nags or giving me a longer and longer runaround every time, slowbanning me, that kinda shit. For password protection, it needs to be one-and-done or work for some long event horizon, like ten or twenty years.
Especially because of the intricate relationship between cryptography and torture, in the endgame. If your crypto is strong and the bad guys are still determined to get your information the only option is to torture you. Elite cryptographers talk about this all the time.
So any half-assed password manager has to be really strong in that scenario. And it was, I bought 1Password in 2008 I think and it worked great, I felt very secure despite getting hacked by amnestic interrogation, which I had no idea of for like a decade. 1Password of 2009 failed only under torture. That is the exact unique kind of next-level shit that is a legitimate situation for a password manager to fail.
1password is basically a bank. A password bank. They should act like a bank instead of acting like I don't know patreon dancer.
