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Comment by Bud | Hacker News Reader

Yet another new service that 1Password is doling out only to those who buy into their new subscription model. Users who, like me, paid three times to buy the app for all their devices are left out in the cold.

I still love 1Password, but this treatment makes me unhappy.

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Presumably it costs them money to develop these new features. Why do you feel like you should have access to new features if you are not a subscriber?

Usually when I buy a software license I expect to receive bug fix updates for that version of the software, but I don't expect to receive feature updates (without paying an additional upgrade fee). Someone that paid for Photoshop 5 did not get Photoshop 6 for free.

Agreed. This idea is essentially that you entitle yourself to all of someone's future time because you paid them for time they already invested.

They already give you future time in the form of bug fixes. To ask for more is blind entitlement and quite silly, yet absolutely rampant.

It's kind of like how we say everyone should work in the food industry for a while because it sobers you up to reality. Maybe the same should be said for trying to sell software or run a website that has actual users.

Those are two additional ways to see how poorly some people will regard you no matter what you do, just like working in the food industry or retail.

> This idea is essentially that you entitle yourself to all of someone's future time because you paid them for time they already invested.

I mean, that's precisely what you do when you buy equity in a company. One time payment goes in, permanent entitlement comes out.

What does that matter? Was the OP an investor taking on risk?

Not quite sure how that's even an exception to what I'm talking about.

People who pay for the products of early-stage startups (or, say, back Kickstarters) have an emotional intuition that they've invested in the company, despite there being no legal truth to that fact.

As a growing company, you have to keep that in mind when modifying your business model: you can't betray the (entirely incorrect!) emotional intuitions of your customers, or they'll boycott you.

Actually you can. I've heard it called "firing your least profitable customers."

I haven't heard too many postmortems of people that've gone "we should've given in to the entitlement of a portion of our users." But I do hear the opposite.

That is true, but the price structures are different. Stock prices, and other equities, are already priced with everyone knowing that you have permanent ownership. Software isn't priced that way. If it were then I would expect prices to be much higher.

> Presumably it costs them money to develop these new features. Why do you feel like you should have access to new features if you are not a subscriber?

Nobody said anything about not being willing to pay money for (new) software/features.

The problem is the subscription model. On of the problems with subscriptions is you loose track of what (new features) you are paying for. Especially when you don't have a lot of money, this is problematic. When making a 1 time purchase, it's very clear what you are paying for. (and cloud services are free already with iCloud sync/Google drive/etc. so the 1password cloud is superfluous, feels like just another excuse to sell a subscription model.)

I mean, are you aware that you are paying $2,99 * 12 * 3 = $107,64 for 3 years of 1Password usage? And that's just 1 of the many app subscriptions...

Subscription model is the only one that makes any sense. These days you can't expect to run a program for many years, because the environment changes too quickly. Programs need to be updated for newer OSs and the world that changes around them. This costs money.

I don't buy it – rather, I can't buy it!

I am happy to exchange money for new versions of software that offer new features, or for compatibility with new versions of operating systems. I expect to pay money for software, have it functioning and supported for an agreed period (say, a couple of years), and then to pay again if I want to continue using it with fancy new features.

That doesn't seem unreasonable or difficult to offer?

At what point are software developers obligated to provide purchase models to suit you? Is not like there's an inherent right to have whatever software you like in whatever form or payment model you like, any more than the OP complaining that somehow having bought multiple versions of software isn't getting a new feature back ported.

I should be clear that nobody’s obligated to do so! Sell your software using whatever model you want. But I think it’s fair to complain when companies don’t offer basic models like “sell me new versions of your product in exchange for money”.

Accept our "subscription model," i.e.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_option_billing

If you feel your bill is in error, please feel free to contact our Customer Support number between 10:00 AM and 3:36 PM Philippines Standard Time.

I've seen this model used at collectorz.com - you buy the software, and it comes with one year of updates. When that year expires, you are basically frozen at the last version of the software, or you can choose to buy an additional year of support for about half the cost of the initial purchase. Seems to be a reasonable compromise to me.

> I mean, are you aware that you are paying $2,99 * 12 * 3 = $107,64 for 3 years

Yes, I'm aware and perfectly fine with it. It's a pretty good price considering.

I agree. I'm thinking about the commercial software I've bought - most of it doesn't include perpetual upgrades (I'm a 1Password license holder who bought into the subscription when it became available - it's easily worth the $7 I pay for my family)

This is a proof of concept that is only available on their subscription service simply because the website version of 1Password is tied to the subscription service. If you read the article they said they'd be adding it to Watchtower, which is the feature built into the native client where it tells you about compromised sites. So once they add it to Watchtower, you'll be able to use it without the subscription service.

I switched from a Mac (died) to a Windows machine, and have lost some 1Password functionality with the change. I too dislike the subscription model.

Thinking of perhaps signing up to their online service with a one-time credit card number with a one month expiry date. This will ensure I do not get charged monthly for a service I do not want. I want to check password vulnerability with this new online-only security feature once in a while and create a back up PDF report of all 1PW entries for storage in my fireproof safe.

I love 1Password; the application got me through a natural disaster and displacement with a minimum amount of technical issue. Unfortunately AgileBits are making decisions that reduce the functionality of the software.

The post mentions they plan to add this to Watchtower [0], which can be enabled for non-subscription accounts as well.

[0] https://support.1password.com/watchtower/

Yeah, I'm pretty annoyed with the subscription switch as well considering the investment I'd already made in their software many times over as a long time user. Sigh.

I don't see how you can be against subscription pricing for living software. You're paying the publisher/developers to continue developing and supporting the software and run associated services. It's the only sustainable model for long lived software and 1Password is good enough to be worth it.

In this case, the subscription service doesn't allow for local vaults. You need to be using the 1Password hosted cloud service to store your passwords. For most of us that is a nonstarter.

This isn't true. Open up Preferences, go to the Advanced tab, and there's a checkbox "Allow creation of vaults outside of 1Password accounts". Check this and you can create local vaults again.

I believe it's disabled by default for 2 reasons:

1. Simplicity. Most people who use the subscription service don't want local vaults, because they won't be synced or available on the web (or subject to administrative controls). By disabling local vaults, you can't accidentally create one.

2. Once you re-enable local vaults, you have a local Primary vault and unlocking that is how you unlock 1Password on this computer. This is a potential point of confusion, because you'll be using a different password now than your 1Password Account password, which comes back to the simplicity angle.

If you already paid a substantially higher price when they were non-subscription based, it can rankle. Especially if the amount paid would have covered well past this point if subscription pricing was available at the time.

I don't think people are complaining that it's a subscription much as they are complaining that the switch seems to leave them with only semi-supported software relatively soon after a full price purchase (even if that may or may not be an accurate assessment of reality).

They are complaining about both, which means they might have a good argument but it's infected with their bad argument.

Can't have your cake and eat it, too. But I suspect they also just don't want to pay a subscription. Well, who does? I also don't like having to pay for coffee.

There is nothing wrong with full price software. It fully works, it just needs to be clearly outlines how long your support lifecycle is, which many companies don't think about. Pay full price, get X years of bugfixes (and access to new versions, depending) from date of purchase.

There's three types of model really, and the problem is when companies have multiple models in place and don't treat them equivalently.

Pay in advance - This is like buying a car. You get a warranty for certain covered problems. Costs a lot.

Pay subscription for local software. - This is like leasing a car. You pay a lesser amount each month, but have full usage of the vehicle. You lose access at the end of the lease.

Pay subscription for cloud based software - This is like using ride-sharing (or maybe a community shared vehicle system) for everything. You have access to the software on demand when you need it, and lose access when no longer a member / you stop using it.

All these models work. The problem with some full price software is they were selling it like it had a warranty and not defining the warranty. Expectations are all over the place, and when they don't match reality, people get upset.

Additionally, in this case people are upset about how there's two models in place and they don't appear to be handled the same, as they had some expectation of a type of warranty with full price software, and all of a sudden it feels like the company has changed how they are handling warranty requests for already sold full price software.

As a company, communicate clearly and follow through with that you've stated, and these problems go away.

I don't want any associated services - Dropbox will host and sync the password wallet files for free. Their other service is downloading icons for websites, but I don't want to send them a list of all my websites.

Yes, there is the occasional need to update Dropbox API code, or Chrome/Android API changes, but their asking price is very steep.

I already paid over $60 for the Android and OS X versions.

So what's wrong with charging for major upgrades like everyone else used to do? Rather than locking you into a greedy subscription forever.

For 1PW it might be ideal to push updates and not charge for them. As a security/tool provider out of date software could be compromised or have issues which might damage their public image.

I'd actually be fine paying a subscription for 1Password, and I do pay a subscription for plenty of other software I use.

I just want the ability to keep using vaults where I control the syncing, vs using the Agilebits-hosted vaults.

I think they said in the post that it was a prototype and would be built into the app later, no?

You say three times as if that is more valuable than paying every month. I paid $35 in 2014 for both the Mac and windows version. I might have upgraded the Mac version once, but anyway you calculate it, I paid way less than subscription pricing.

Why not subscribe then? They solve your problem and the cost is very minimal.

I’ve got the license years ago, one time payment and 1Password came with a bunch of other software in the bundle.

I still use it to this day, syncing via Dropbox and working across multiple devices.

I am curious to know what other services are exclusive to their subscription model.

Every time 1Password is mentioned here, the top comments complain about their new subscription model. And yet, they've never made any noise suggesting it isn't working out well for them as a company.

I'm beginning to think that it's just the HN echo chamber, and that the majority of users (the sort of people who have never filed bug reports against a compiler, let's say) are fine with reasonably priced subscriptions. As a techie, this rubs me strangely, but as a budding indie developer, it's rather reassuring.

There's several things that drive me crazy about 1Password, but subscriptions aren't near the top of that list.

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