Wow, this is tremendously bad communication from their team. I don't care about the local vault feature, but the lack of empathy in the responses from AgileBits is certainly making me reconsider my family account.
That person probably got testy because they were being treated so poorly.
I don’t think I saw any validation of a reasonable concern—which is like customer service 101—let alone any type of attempt to win the user (back) over. This is classic, stereotypical techie behavior and it needs to die. And I say that as a developer (who has been plenty guilty of this tendency myself…)
His key beef is they neglected to mention the change in their release notes, and the optics of the oversight could be perceived as a covert move to push people toward their cloud service. I'm surprised they didn't apologize for the release notes oversight (whether or not it was inadvertent) - they kind of act like it's just another benign collateral effect that will only impact a handful of people.
Sure, maybe he's on a free plan, but when I shilled free trial versions of my software I tried to treat all [existing or potential] customers with white gloves - even the irritating ones.
@TroyHunt are you out there; any thoughts on the software change?
Whereas the company literally removed a non-trivial piece of functionality without a single mention of it in Release Notes, and then disengaged from the topic once other people came in and pointed out that this is a) bad, and b) probably a blatant attempt at pushing people into the subscription model.
Overall, I know what password manager I'm not touching now.
Additionally, this is asynchronous communication. Take a breath. Recover. Do it right.