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Comment by notafraudster | Hacker News Reader

I used 1password for about ten years. Every interaction I had with the developers was pretty hostile. Even if they encouraged self-hosting and version-based upgrading instead of a SaaS, I'd still stick with a competitor. At this point I'm irrationally bothered by the fact that it's a 100+ staff company just to make a product that's no better than it was when they had 10 staff and is now more expensive.

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> At this point I'm irrationally bothered by the fact that it's a 100+ staff company just to make a product that's no better than it was when they had 10 staff and is now more expensive.

Supporting more customers and larger scale is inherently more expensive, but I still don’t understand how the product feels like it peaked about 5 years ago and has been treading water ever since.

I don’t mind paying $50 or even $100 for a good password manager that I could rely on for several years. However, it feels like these moves toward subscription software are aimed at extracting $300 or more from me for the same time period, all while failing to provide a decently updated experience.

I do routinely pay $150/year or more for other software packages like JetBrains IDEs, but those are constantly updated. With 1Password it feels like the move to subscription was a step backwards in features with a huge step up in long term price. No thanks.

> I used 1password for about ten years. Every interaction I had with the developers was pretty hostile. Even if they encouraged self-hosting and version-based upgrading instead of a SaaS, I'd still stick with a competitor. At this point I'm irrationally bothered by the fact that it's a 100+ staff company just to make a product that's no better than it was when they had 10 staff and is now more expensive.

I have no idea why you're being downvoted for expressing your experience and opinions. So I will just add another data point to corroborate your experience and (probably) be downvoted together.

I've also been a long time user who paid for every upgrade, and every issue I had with them I received a hostile response or a completely dismissive one. Not sure which is worse.

This made me jump ship last year and now I'm a happy bitwarden user.

No, it's not perfect as you can see in others comments around here but at least I don't have the constant nag that their values are misaligned with mine: forcing a subscription model down my throat at almost 4x the amount of money that bitwarden asks with fading support for standalone licenses and local vaults.

Just to add another data point, I’ve been with them since almost day one and every interaction I’ve had has been very nice. They even got my data out of a backup when something weird happened when switching from a business to family plan. (I might be a weird edge case since my account shows as both family and business a custom domain).

If they can get your data out then do they have access to your keys?

Most probably encrypted data out of a backup for you to use after unlocking.

What are the good competitors you recommend? Dashlane?

I didn't want to respond while the thread was active because I didn't want to seem like I was advertising anything. I switched to BitWarden, personally. I am not saying it's better than 1Password (in fact, it's a little less slick in my opinion) but I was able to switch for free upfront, it works on all my devices, and overall the community of users seems much happier with the developers. This is not me saying "you should use it", just me saying "I ended up choosing it".

My wife's boss uses Dashlane, and I got the impression that was a pretty good choice if you were looking for ease of use for non-technical personnel.

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